Unlike literary forms that feature an appeal to the exotic and the far-away in place and time, novels are stories of now or about events in a relevant past. Credibility and probability the essential qualities. Everyday existence and common people. The subjectivity of the novel involves not just a raised status for the individual self but an intensified consciousness of selfhood. The novel seeks to gather its multiple parts under some guiding design, theme or governing idea.
Novels tend to be morc explicitly ideological than most literary species.
The freedom to digress. A generation before, writers such as Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Mary DelaRivier Manley and Penelope Aubin had created significant works of fiction of the emerging kind. Richardson and Fielding created a consciousness among readers and potential writers that a significant and lasting form had been come about and that literary careers could be built upon the genre. Return to Aphra Behn Home Page .