Social novel

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The social novel, also known as the social problem (or social protest) novel, is a "work of fiction in which a prevailing social problem, such as gender, race, or class

child labor, violence against women, rising criminality, and epidemics because of over-crowding and poor sanitation in cities.[2]

Terms like thesis novel, propaganda novel, industrial novel, working-class novel and problem novel are also used to describe this type of novel;

proletarian novel is a political form of the social protest novel which may emphasize revolution.[4]
While early examples are found in 18th century Britain, social novels have been written throughout Europe and the United States.

Britain

Manchester, England ("Cottonopolis"), pictured in 1840, showing the mass of factory chimneys

Although this subgenre of the novel is usually seen as having its origins in the 19th century, there were precursors in the 18th century, like Amelia by Henry Fielding (1751), Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) by William Godwin, The Adventures of Hugh Trevor (1794–1797) by Thomas Holcroft, and Nature and Art (1796) by Elizabeth Inchbald.[5] However, whereas Inchbald laid responsibility for social problems with the depravity and corruption of individuals, Godwin, in Caleb Williams, saw society's corruption as insurmountable.[6]

In England during the 1830s and 1840s the social novel "arose out of the social and political upheavals which followed the

industrialization
, and the social, political and economic issues associated with it, and was a means of commenting on abuses of government and industry and the suffering of the poor, who were not profiting from England's economic prosperity. These works were directed at the middle class to help create sympathy and promote change.

The social novel is also referred to as the "Condition-of-England novel". The term derives from the "

Chartist movement was a working-class political reformist movement that sought universal male suffrage and other parliamentary reforms. Chartism failed as a parliamentary movement; however, five of the "Six Points" of Chartism would become a reality within a century of the group's formation. "Condition-of-England novels sought to engage directly with the contemporary social and political issues with a focus on the representation of class, gender, and labour relations, as well as on social unrest and the growing antagonism between the rich and the poor in England". Authors wrote in response to Carlyle's warning that "if something be not done, something will do itself one day, and in a fashion that will please nobody."[9]

A significant early example of this genre is

The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Sybil traces the plight of the working classes of England. Disraeli was interested in dealing with the horrific conditions in which the majority of England's working classes lived. The book is a roman à thèse
, a novel with a thesis, which aimed to create a furor over the squalor that was plaguing England's working class cities. Disraeli's interest in this subject stemmed from his interest in the Chartist movement.

Another early example of the social novel is Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke (1849), a work that set out to expose the social injustice suffered by workers in the clothing trade as well as the trials and tribulations of agricultural labourers. It also gives an insight into the Chartist campaign with which Kingsley was involved in the 1840s.

industrialists, focusing more on the thinking and perspective of the employers.[11] Shirley (1849), Charlotte Brontë's second published novel after Jane Eyre, is also a social novel. Set in Yorkshire in the period 1811–12, during the industrial depression resulting from the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812, the action in Shirley takes place against a backdrop of the Luddite
uprisings in the Yorkshire textile industry.

Social problems are also an important concern in the novels of

Midlands industrial town. It particularly criticizes the effect of Utilitarianism on the lives of the working classes in cities. John Ruskin declared Hard Times to be his favourite Dickens work due to its exploration of important social questions. Walter Allen characterised Hard Times as being an unsurpassed "critique of industrial society", though later superseded by works of D. H. Lawrence. Karl Marx asserted that Dickens "issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together".[15]: 155  On the other hand, George Orwell, in his essay on Dickens, wrote, "There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as 'human nature'."[16]

Continental Europe

Arguably, Victor Hugo's 1862 work Les Misérables was the most significant social protest novel of the 19th century in Europe. His work touches upon most of the political and social issues and artistic trends of his time. Upton Sinclair described the novel as "one of the half-dozen greatest novels of the world," and remarked that Hugo set forth the purpose of Les Misérables in the Preface:[17]

So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of women by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.

Among other French writers, Émile Zola's realist fiction contained many social protest works, including L'Assommoir (1877), which deals with life in an urban slum; and Germinal (1885), which is about a coal miners' strike. In his work-notes for the latter novel, Zola described it as posing what was to be the next century's, "'the twentieth century's most important question', namely the conflict between the forces of modern Capitalism and the interests of the human beings necessary to its advance."[18] Both Hugo and Zola were politically engaged, and suffered exile due to their political positions.[19]

Russian author Leo Tolstoy championed reform for his own country, particularly in education. Tolstoy did not consider his most famous work, War and Peace, to be a novel (nor did he consider many of the great Russian fictions written at that time to be novels). This view becomes less surprising if one considers that Tolstoy was a novelist of the realist school who considered the novel to be a framework for the examination of social and political issues in nineteenth-century life.[20] War and Peace (which was to Tolstoy really an epic in prose) therefore did not qualify. Tolstoy thought that Anna Karenina was his first true novel.[21]

America

An early American example is

Huckleberry Finn (1884) is another early American social protest novel. Much of modern scholarship of Huckleberry Finn has focused on its treatment of race. Many Twain scholars have argued that the book, by humanizing Jim and exposing the fallacies of the racist assumptions of slavery, is an attack on racism.[25] Others have argued that the book falls short on this score, especially in its depiction of Jim. According to Professor Stephen Railton of the University of Virginia, Twain was unable to fully rise above the stereotypes of Black people that white readers of his era expected and enjoyed, and therefore resorted to minstrel show-style comedy to provide humor at Jim's expense, and ended up confirming rather than challenging late-19th century racist stereotypes.[26]

John Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath often is cited as the most successful social protest novel of the 20th century. Part of its impact stemmed from its passionate depiction of the plight of the poor, and in fact, many of Steinbeck's contemporaries attacked his social and political views. Bryan Cordyack writes, "Steinbeck was attacked as a propagandist and a socialist from both the left and the right of the political spectrum. The most fervent of these attacks came from the Associated Farmers of California; they were displeased with the book's depiction of California farmers' attitudes and conduct toward the migrants. They denounced the book as a 'pack of lies' and labeled it 'communist propaganda'.[27] Some accused Steinbeck of exaggerating camp conditions to make a political point. Steinbeck had visited the camps well before publication of the novel[28] and argued their inhumane nature destroyed the settlers' spirit. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt championed Steinbeck's book against his detractors, and helped bring about Congressional hearings on the conditions in migrant farmer camps that led to changes in federal labor law.[29]

Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.[34][35]

A more recent social novel is

James Baldwin's 1949 essay "Everybody's Protest Novel" dismissed Native Son as protest fiction, and therefore limited in its understanding of human character and its artistic value.[37]

James Baldwin's novels and plays fictionalize fundamental personal questions and dilemmas amid complex social and psychological pressures thwarting the equitable integration of not only Blacks yet also of male

equality of homosexuals was widely espoused in America.[38] Baldwin's best-known novel is his first, Go Tell It on the Mountain
(1953).

Proletarian novel

The proletarian novel, according to the Encyclopædia Britannica comes out of the direct experience of working class life and "is essentially an intended device of revolution", while works by middle-class novelists, like

Maksim Gorky, is an example of a proletarian writer, however, in the Soviet Union the proletarian novel was doomed to disappear "in the form that Gorky knew, for it is the essence of the revolutionary novel to possess vitality and validity only when written under capitalist 'tyranny'".[40] But the proletarian novel has also been categorized without any emphasis on revolution, as a novel "about the working classes and working-class life; perhaps with the intention of making propaganda",[41]
and this may reflect a difference between Russian, American and other traditions of working-class writing, with that of Britain (see below).

The United States has had a number of working-class, socialist authors, such as

communist, Gold was a novelist and literary critic. His semi-autobiographical novel Jews without Money (1930) was a bestseller. Other American examples of the proletarian novel include Agnes Smedley's Daughter of Earth (1929), Robert Cantwell's Land of Plenty (1934), Albert Halper's The Foundry (1934) and Albert Maltz's The Underground Stream (1940); other writers include James T. Farrell, Josephine Herbst, Tillie Olsen, and Meridel Le Sueur
.

However, the British tradition of working class writing was not solely inspired by the

Salford, where Greenwood was born and brought up. The novel begins around the time of the General Strike
of 1926, but its main action takes place in 1931.

Young adult problem novel

The young adult problem novel deals with an adolescent's first confrontation with a social, or personal problem.[47] The term was first used this way in the late 1960s with reference to contemporary works like The Outsiders, a coming-of-age novel by S. E. Hinton, first published in 1967. The adolescent problem novel is rather loosely defined. Rose Mary Honnold in The Teen Reader's Advisor defines them as dealing more with characters from lower-class families and their problems; and as using "grittier", more realistic language, including dialects, profanity, and poor grammar, when it fits the character and setting.

Hinton's The Outsiders (1967) and

Newbery Award-winning novel It's Like This, Cat (1963) by Emily Cheney Neville may have established "the problem novel formula". Go Ask Alice (1971) is an early example of the subgenre and is often considered an example of the negative aspects of the form (although the author is "Anonymous", it is largely or wholly the work of its purported editor, Beatrice Sparks). A more recent example is Adam Rapp
's The Buffalo Tree (1997).

Other social novels

Robert Tressell banner

See also

Notes

  1. ^ "social problem novel" in Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2012. Web. 04 Nov. 2012. [1].
  2. ^ "Childers, JW (2001)"
  3. ^ Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature 7th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall,1996), pp. 412,487, 518-9; M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th ed. (Fort Worth, TX, : Harcourt Brace,1999), p.193
  4. ^ "Proletarian" in "novel." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2013. Web. 25 Apr. 2013. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/421071/novel.
  5. ^ Mona Scheuermann, Social Protest in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel. (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State State University Press, 1985).
  6. .
  7. ^ Bloomsbury Guide to English Literature, ed.Marion Wynne-Davies. (New York: Prentice Hall,1990), p. 101.
  8. ^ Wood, James, ed. (1907). "Carlyle, Thomas" . The Nuttall Encyclopædia. London and New York: Frederick Warne.
  9. ^ "Condition-of-England Novels". victorianweb.org. Retrieved 2022-08-10.
  10. ^ Alison Chapman, ed. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton and North and South. Duxford: Icon Books, 1999.
  11. ^ Alison Chapman
  12. from the original on 26 September 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2015.
  13. .
  14. from the original on 19 November 2016. Retrieved 18 February 2016.
  15. from the original on 19 November 2016. Retrieved 18 February 2016.
  16. ^ Eliot, George. "Charles Dickens".
  17. .
  18. ^ Robert Lethbridge, "Introduction" to Germinal by Émile Zola, trans. Peter Collier. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p.vii.
  19. ^ Frey, John Andrew (1999). A Victor Hugo Encyclopedia. Greenwood Press; Brown, Frederick (1995). Zola: A Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
  20. ^ Tolstoy and the Development of Realism. G Lukacs. Marxists on Literature: An Anthology, London: Penguin, 1977
  21. ^ Tolstoy and the Novel. J Bayley – 1967 – Chatto & Windus
  22. ^ "social problem novel." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online Academic Edition
  23. .
  24. .
  25. ^ For exampleShelley Fisher Fishin (1997). Lighting out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
  26. ^ Stephen Railton (1987). "Jim and Mark Twain: What Do Dey Stan' For?". The Virginia Quarterly Review. Retrieved April 12, 2012.
  27. ^ Cordyack, Brian. "20th-Century American Bestsellers: John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath". Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Archived from the original on February 24, 2005. Retrieved February 18, 2007.
  28. ^ Shillinglaw, Susan; Benson, Jackson J (February 2, 2002). "Of Men and Their Making: The Non-Fiction Of John Steinbeck". London: Penguin. Retrieved December 17, 2008.
  29. ^ "The Grapes of Wrath". National Public Radio.
  30. ^ "The Jungle". History News Network.
  31. ^ Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. Dover Thrift Editions., General Editor Paul Negri; Editor of The Jungle, Joslyn T Pine. Note: pp. vii-viii
  32. ^ "Upton Sinclair". The Historical Society of Southern California. Archived from the original on March 13, 2013.
  33. ^ "Sinclair's 'The Jungle' Turns 100". PBS Newshour. 10 May 2006. Retrieved 10 June 2010.
  34. ^ Marcus, p. 131
  35. ^ Bloom, Harold, ed. (2002). Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Infobase Publishing. p. 11.
  36. ^ "Richard Wright's Life".
  37. .
  38. ^ Jean-François Gounardoo, Joseph J. Rodgers (1992). The Racial Problem in the Works of Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Greenwood Press. pp. 158, 148–200.
  39. ^ "Proletarian" in "novel." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2013. Web. 25 Apr. 2013. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/421071/novel.
  40. ^ "Proletarian" in "novel." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online Academic Edition.
  41. ^ J. A. Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Criticism. (London: Penguin Books), 1999. p. 703.
  42. ^ "War of the Classes: How I Became a Socialist". london.sonoma.edu. Archived from the original on 2006-09-06.
  43. ^ See Labor (1994) p. 546 for one example, a letter from London to William E. Walling dated November 30, 1909.
  44. ^ Brighton: Harvest Press, 1982, p.1.
  45. ^ John Fordham, "'A Strange Field': Region and Class in the Novels of Harold Heslop" in Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain, ed. Kristin Bluemel. Published 2009 :Edinburgh University Press, note no.1, p.71.
  46. ^ J. A Cuddon, p. 703.
  47. JSTOR 816529
    .
  48. ^ Margaret Drabble, The Oxford Companion to English Literature. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp.584-5.
  49. ^ Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature, New York, Macmillan, 1969, pp. 294–95; Zygmunt Szweykowski, Twórczość Bolesława Prusa (The Art of Bolesław Prus), 2nd ed., Warsaw, Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1972, pp. 130–51.
  50. ^ Victorian Web
  51. Central European University Press, 1996; Czesław Miłosz
    , The History of Polish Literature, second edition, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1983, pp. 295–99.
  52. ^ "DreiserWebSource - Sister Carrie". www.library.upenn.edu. Archived from the original on 2003-06-18.
  53. ^ "Rereading: Howard Brenton on The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell", The Guardian, Saturday 5 February 2011.
  54. ^ "John Dos Passos." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2013. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/169718/John-Dos-Passos>.Web. 28 Apr. 2013; Carr, Virginia Spencer (1984). Dos Passos: A Life. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.
  55. ^ Penniless Press: James T Farrell by Jim Burns retrieved April 28, 2013
  56. ^ Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (4th ed.). (Princeton University Press, 1972).
  57. ^ "1939 Book Awards Given by Critics: Elgin Groseclose's 'Ararat' is Picked ...", The New York Times, 1940-02-14, page 25. ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851-2007).
  58. ^ Carol Polsgrove, Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement. 9New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.
  59. ^ M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, p. 193.
  60. ^ Gardner, Susan (1990). "A Story for This Place and Time: An Interview with Nadine Gordimer about Burger's Daughter". In Bazin, Nancy Topping; Seymour, Marilyn Dallman. Conversations with Nadine Gordimer. Univ. Press of Mississippi. pp. 161–175.

Further reading

Young adult problem fiction

External links