Is Spain unique in the sense that their greatest work of literature is a prose novel? Is it because Don Quixote was so unique and revolutionary? With the exception of perhaps Russia (which is a special case) it seems that the best of the best of each (western) nation is in verse. It makes me wonder whether verse is necessarily superior to prose or whether both can achieve the same heights.
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Ireland's greatest literary work is also a prose novel (Ulysses).
Also America and Colombia
For America, I would disagree that the best of the best works are verse. Faulker and Hemingway are held in much higher regard than Poe or Whitman.
True. America's greatest work is a prose novel.
America inherits a lot of the English literary tradition pre-1700 so Chaucer, Shakespeare, and even maybe Milton are still the best. Should probably think in terms of language rather than nationality.
No, that's gay.
In Brazil, Bras Cubas is probably regarded as the greatest work in literature and it is in prose.
>But merely on the strength of New Grub Street, Demos and The Odd Women I am ready to maintain that England has produced very few better novelists. This perhaps sounds like a rash statement until one stops to consider what is meant by a novel. The word ‘novel’ is commonly used to cover almost any kind of story — The Golden Ass, Anna Karenina, Don Quixote, The Improvisatore, Madame Bovary, King Solomon's Mines or anything else you like — but it also has a narrower sense in which it means something hardly existing before the nineteenth century and flourishing chiefly in Russia and France. A novel, in this sense, is a story which attempts to describe credible human beings, and — without necessarily using the technique of naturalism — to show them acting on everyday motives and not merely undergoing strings of improbable adventures. A true novel, sticking to this definition, will also contain at least two characters, probably more, who are described from the inside and on the same level of probability — which, in effect, rules out the novels written in the first person. If one accepts this definition, it becomes apparent that the novel is not an art-form in which England has excelled. The writers commonly paraded as ‘great English novelists’ have a way of turning out either not to be true novelists, or not to be Englishmen. Gissing was not a writer of picaresque tales, or burlesques, or comedies, or political tracts: he was interested in individual human beings, and the fact that he can deal sympathetically with several different sets of motives, and makes a credible story out of the collision between them, makes him exceptional among English writers.
I've been looking for sources on that narrow definition of the novel, I should have expected Orwell wrote on it as well. It's still hard to deny England their skill at verse. The inside of an Englishman's head isn't a place worth reading about.
I can't find a definition, but it is undeniable that nineteenth century French novelists were doing something different from whatever Samuel Johnson was doing.
Common points of the definition I've been working from are that the novel
>is read in private and not meant to be an oratory work
>differs from the medieval romance in that regard and that it deals with an outright human psychology and personality given character
>such that characters act in ways that a given personality would, which is in some way the centerpoint
>deals with private matters of thought and action that would otherwise be unseen by a third party
>deals with some level of interiority of the characters, although expressing their thoughts is in no way a requirement
>is most often an account of a series of events leading to an epiphany that stems from the case built by them, not always on the part of the characters or narrator
and some other things but I can't think of them. Flaubert is entirely responsible for the conventions of the Modern novel in the sense of modernism. The Genji is more a modern novel than many of the works that come between. Orwell seems to be limiting the definition further for arbitrary reasons, but he's right that the absurd wheel of fortune that plays into the picaresque pushes things back into romance or fable.
I find el Quixote still applies because it isn't about the absurd quests, it's about two dudes talking about nothing along the way and the explicit and implied interiority of them that permeates it.
Is it written in narrative prose? Yes or no?
Is what? A novel (the new) is not a romance, which is not a travelogue or fairy tale. It's a pretty limited thing and half the shit currently called novels don't apply for even more fundamental reasons I didn't even list.
But is it written in narrative prose in your definition? Yes or no?
What is "narrative" prose? You sound like you're trying to set me up for a gotcha because you don't know what you're talking about at all right now.
You're a bit too paranoid. I'm just asking a question.
There's a novel in free verse that I really like, but it's really stretching the definition and heavily seasoned with postmodern wank, which moves it back in line with contemporary trends for novels of the 90s. That's about as far as I'd take it and would prefer not to. So, novels are not primarily written or formatted in metrical verse.
Looks like she's just describing the realist novel and thinks she's saying something deep. Misguided autism.
it's funny because Cervantes was very self-conscious about his style, and how uninspired his attempts at poetry were when he compared himself to other Spanish authors of his time.
Spain has a national epic in verse, by the way, though it's quite different in themes and tone when compared to Beowulf, The Divine Comedy, the Poetic Edda, the Nibelungen saga and so on.
I thought so too, but then I read Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
The best work of Russian literature is Eugene Onegin
Don Quixote has never been properly translated into English. In order for this to happen any words Don Quixote speaks must be rendered into Middle English, otherwise, the archaicness of Quixote's language with respect to all other dialogue is lost on the reader. The French understood this. In French translations all of Quixote's dialogue is rendered into Old French.
>which is a special case
why?
what's unique about their greatest novel is that it's utter dogshit that a child could write.
>could would should
The domain of the losers.