Date of Award
4-1935
Degree Type
Bachelors Essay
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts (BA)
Department
Philosophy
First Advisor
James M. Purcell
Second Advisor
Margaret Lawler
Third Advisor
William J. Grace
Abstract
The novel, as we understand it, is comparatively modern, although the instinct for a good story, on which the interest in fiction is base, may be as old as human speech. Grimm*s Fairy Tales, which may be called the unsophisticated folk tales, with neither their characters nor incidents true to life, and in scale so limited, can only be considered as a very remote ancestor. Aesop*s Fables are just anecdotes with a moral. The myths, continued in the Odyssey and the Song of the Volsungs for example, are not primarily concerned with human life at all. Epic poetry such as the AEneid, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and also the Odyssey, depends for its principle entertainment upon some great racial or national issue. From its verse a sustained elevation is revised which is almost impossible to develop in prose. The Epic poem does not depend upon individual personality or the passion of love for its main interest. The romances of the Middle Ages are basically interesting as marvelous adventure, though usually concerned with the fortunes of individuals and the passion of love. But they are loosely constructed and shallow in treatment. The fables of the Middle Ages - such as the Tales of the Miller and the Reeve in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to which the short story of the modern magazine may claim its ancestry, do not try to picture a whole phase of life in its delicacy and intricacy, but are concerned with single situations. The novel of the Renaissance, such as Boccacio’s Decameron, belong in the same category. All these forms contain an element, common to them and the novel, but as can readily be seen each in some way either falls short or goes beyond our modern idea of prose fiction.
Recommended Citation
Schumaker, Marion Jeanette, "The Greater Eighteenth Century Novelists" (1935). Bachelors’ Theses. 2065.
https://epublications.marquette.edu/bachelor_essays/2065
Comments
A Thesis submitted to of the College of Liberal Arts of in Partial Fulfillment of for the Degree of Bachelor of the Faculty the Marquette University the Requirements Philosophy, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.