Social novel
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
Terms like thesis novel, propaganda novel, industrial novel, working-class novel and problem novel are also used to describe this type of novel;
Britain
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
The social novel is also referred to as the "Condition-of-England novel". The term derives from the "
A significant early example of this genre is
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.
Social problems are also an important concern in the novels of
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
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]
A more recent social novel is
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
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
The United States has had a number of working-class, socialist authors, such as
However, the British tradition of working class writing was not solely inspired by the
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
Other social novels
- Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1853) focuses on the corrupt, inefficient English legal system, and comments on the suffering of the poor.
- Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens (1857) is a work of satire on the shortcomings of the government and society of the period.[48]
- Felix Holt by George Eliot (1866) is a social novel written about political disputes in a small English town at the time of the First Reform Actof 1832.
- The Outpost by Bolesław Prus (1886), written in a Poland that had been partitioned a century earlier by Russia, Prussia and Austria, portrays the plight of rural Poland, contending with poverty, ignorance, neglect by the upper crust, and colonization by German settlers backed by Otto von Bismarck's German government.[49]
- Out of Work (1888) by Margaret Harkness: "In her slum novels, Margaret Harkness highlighted such social problems as social degradation, poverty, philanthropy, and oppression of women".[50]
- The Doll by Bolesław Prus (1889) draws a comprehensive, compelling picture of late-19th century partitioned Poland, mired in societal inertia.[51]
- Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900) is an influential example of Naturalism and a major American urban novel. Amongst other things it explores how industrialization affected the American people.[52]
- The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914) by Robert Tressell is an explicitly political work, widely regarded as a classic of working-class literature.[53]
- U.S.A. Trilogy by John Dos Passos: The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936). In the 1930s Dos Passos was a social revolutionary who saw the United States as two nations, one rich and one poor. In 1928, he spent several months in Russia studying their socialist system, and he was a leading participator in the April 1935 First American Writers Congress sponsored by the Communist-leaning League of American Writers.[54]
- Studs Lonigan Trilogy by James T. Farrell: Young Lonigan (1932), The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (1934), Judgment Day (1935). Farrell wrote these three novels during the Great Depression, at a time of national despair, with the intention of exposing the evils of capitalism and desiring a total overhaul of the American political and economic system.[55]
- To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway (1936) is a social commentary on the 1930s, that was heavily influenced by Marxist ideology, as Hemingway was on the side of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War as he was writing it.[56]
- National Book Awards: the Most Original Book of 1939.[57]
- Blood on the Forge by William Attaway (1941) provides social commentary on African-American experiences during the early twentieth century, particularly for those who joined the Great Migration northward from the miseries of sharecropping, only to be met with brutal treatment in the mills of the industrializing north.
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952) addresses many of the social and intellectual issues facing African-Americans in the mid-twentieth century, including Black nationalism, the relationship between Black identity and Marxism, and the reformist racial policies of Booker T. Washington, as well as issues of individuality and personal identity.[58]
- Burger's Daughter (1979) by Nadine Gordimer.[59] Many of Gordimer's works have explored the impact of apartheid on individuals in South Africa. In Burger's Daughter a theme, that is present in several of her novels, is that of racially divided societies in which well-meaning whites unexpectedly encounter a side of Black life they did not know about.[60]
- The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up (2012) by Jacob M. Appel addresses efforts to suppress freedom of expression during the war on terror.
- Notably Demons (1862) by Fyodor Dostoevsky as well as House of the Dead, Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, but nearly every novel, short story, and journal written by Dostoevsky after his imprisonment in Siberiafor anti-government activity is classifiable as such.
See also
- Dystopia
- Illegitimacy in fiction
- Political fiction
- Problem play
- Proletarian literature
- Social science fiction
- Social thriller
Notes
- ^ "social problem novel" in Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2012. Web. 04 Nov. 2012. [1].
- ^ "Childers, JW (2001)"
- ^ 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
- ^ "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.
- ^ Mona Scheuermann, Social Protest in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel. (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State State University Press, 1985).
- ISBN 0-8142-0403-1.
- ^ Bloomsbury Guide to English Literature, ed.Marion Wynne-Davies. (New York: Prentice Hall,1990), p. 101.
- ^ Wood, James, ed. (1907). . The Nuttall Encyclopædia. London and New York: Frederick Warne.
- ^ "Condition-of-England Novels". victorianweb.org. Retrieved 2022-08-10.
- ^ Alison Chapman, ed. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton and North and South. Duxford: Icon Books, 1999.
- ^ Alison Chapman
- ISBN 978-1-85619-000-8. Archivedfrom the original on 26 September 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2015.
- ISBN 978-0-299-10610-2.
- ISBN 978-0-521-72231-5. Archivedfrom the original on 19 November 2016. Retrieved 18 February 2016.
- ISBN 978-0-19-516921-8. Archivedfrom the original on 19 November 2016. Retrieved 18 February 2016.
- ^ Eliot, George. "Charles Dickens".
- ISBN 978-1-247-96345-7.
- ^ Robert Lethbridge, "Introduction" to Germinal by Émile Zola, trans. Peter Collier. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p.vii.
- ^ Frey, John Andrew (1999). A Victor Hugo Encyclopedia. Greenwood Press; Brown, Frederick (1995). Zola: A Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- ^ Tolstoy and the Development of Realism. G Lukacs. Marxists on Literature: An Anthology, London: Penguin, 1977
- ^ Tolstoy and the Novel. J Bayley – 1967 – Chatto & Windus
- ^ "social problem novel." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online Academic Edition
- ISBN 978-0-8021-4390-7.
- ISBN 978-1-59555-055-2.
- ^ For exampleShelley Fisher Fishin (1997). Lighting out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
- ^ Stephen Railton (1987). "Jim and Mark Twain: What Do Dey Stan' For?". The Virginia Quarterly Review. Retrieved April 12, 2012.
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ "The Grapes of Wrath". National Public Radio.
- ^ "The Jungle". History News Network.
- ^ Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. Dover Thrift Editions., General Editor Paul Negri; Editor of The Jungle, Joslyn T Pine. Note: pp. vii-viii
- ^ "Upton Sinclair". The Historical Society of Southern California. Archived from the original on March 13, 2013.
- ^ "Sinclair's 'The Jungle' Turns 100". PBS Newshour. 10 May 2006. Retrieved 10 June 2010.
- ^ Marcus, p. 131
- ^ Bloom, Harold, ed. (2002). Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Infobase Publishing. p. 11.
- ^ "Richard Wright's Life".
- ISBN 0-06-083756-X.
- ^ 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.
- ^ "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.
- ^ "Proletarian" in "novel." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online Academic Edition.
- ^ J. A. Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Criticism. (London: Penguin Books), 1999. p. 703.
- ^ "War of the Classes: How I Became a Socialist". london.sonoma.edu. Archived from the original on 2006-09-06.
- ^ See Labor (1994) p. 546 for one example, a letter from London to William E. Walling dated November 30, 1909.
- ^ Brighton: Harvest Press, 1982, p.1.
- ^ 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.
- ^ J. A Cuddon, p. 703.
- JSTOR 816529.
- ^ Margaret Drabble, The Oxford Companion to English Literature. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp.584-5.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Victorian Web
- Central European University Press, 1996; Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature, second edition, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1983, pp. 295–99.
- ^ "DreiserWebSource - Sister Carrie". www.library.upenn.edu. Archived from the original on 2003-06-18.
- ^ "Rereading: Howard Brenton on The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell", The Guardian, Saturday 5 February 2011.
- ^ "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.
- ^ Penniless Press: James T Farrell by Jim Burns retrieved April 28, 2013
- ^ Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (4th ed.). (Princeton University Press, 1972).
- ^ "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).
- ^ Carol Polsgrove, Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement. 9New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.
- ^ M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, p. 193.
- ^ 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
- Childers, Joseph W. "Industrial culture and the Victorian novel". In The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (David, Deirde, ed.), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001. (ISBN 0-521-64619-7)
- Gallagher, Catherine. The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1985.
- Haywood, Ian, Working-Class Fiction: from Chartism to "Trainspotting". Plymouth: Nortcote House, 1997.
- Kenton, Edna (1916), "The Beginnings of the Problem Novel", in Maurice, Arthur Bartlett (ed.), Dodd, Mead and Company, pp. 434–439
- Kestner, Joseph A(1985) "Protest and reform: the British social narrative by women, 1827-1867" Blackwell Publishing.
- Kettle, Arnold. "The Early Victorian Social-Problem Novel", in: Boris Ford, ed. The New Pelican Guide to English Literature. From Dickens to Hardy. (vol. 6). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990.
- Klaus, H. Gustav, The Literature of Labour: Two Hundred Years of Working-Class Writing. Brighton: Harvester, 1985. ISBN 0-7108-0631-0
- Klaus, H. Gustav and Knight, Steven, eds. British Industrial Fictions. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000.
- Lindner C. "Outside Looking In: Material Culture in Gaskell's Industrial Novels" Orbis Litterarum, Volume 55, Number 5, 1 October 2000, pp. 379–396(18)
- Lukàcs, Georg. Studies in European Realism. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964.
- Morris, Pam. "Imagining inclusive society in nineteenth-century novels: the code of sincerity in the public sphere" JHU Press, 2004.
- Murphy, James F.: The Proletarian Moment. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Ill 1991.
- Tillotson, Kathleen. Novels of the Eighteen Forties. London: Oxford University Press, 1954.
- Vargo, Gregory. "An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel." Cambridge University Press, 2018.
- Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780–1950. New York, Columbia University Press, 1958.
- York, R.A. "Strangers and Secrets: Communication in the Nineteenth-century Novel". Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1994.
- Young adult problem fiction
- Julia Eccleshare, "Teenage Fiction: Realism, romances, contemporary problem novels". In Peter Hunt, ed.. International Companion Encyclopedia of Children's Literature. London: Routledge,1996, pp. 387–396.
- Sheila Egoff, "The Problem Novel". In Shiela Egoff, ed. Only Connect: readings on children's literature (2nd ed.). Ontario: Oxford University Press; 1980, pp. 356–369, and "The Problem Novel". Thursday's Child: Trends and Patterns in Contemporary Children's Literature. Chicago: American Library Association, 1981.
- Isaac Gilman, "Shutting the Window: The Loss of Innocence in Twentieth-Century Children's Literature". The Looking Glass, 9 (3), September 2005.
- Alleen Pace Nilsen, "That Was Then ... This Is Now". School Library Journal, 40 (4): April 1994, pp. 62–70.
External links
- See: Thomas Carlyle's The Condition of England
- "How novels help drive social evolution" by Priya Shetty, New Scientist, 14 January 2009. Subscription needed
- http://www.readbookonline.org/title/275/