The essential difference between novel and romance lies in the conception of characterization. The romancer does not attempt to cr...eate "real people" so much as stylized figures which expand into psychological archetypes. It is in the romance that we find Jung's libido, anima, and shadow reflected in the hero, heroine, and villain respectively. That is why the romance so often radiates a glow of subjective intensity that the novel lacks, and why a suggestion of allegory is constantly creeping in around the fringes. Certain elements of character are released in the romance which make it naturally a more revolutionary form than the novel. The novelist deals with personality, with characters wearing their personae or social masks. He needs the framework of a stable society, and many of our best novelists have been conventional to the verge of fussiness. The romancer deals with individuality, with characters in vacuo idealized by revery, and, however conservative he may be, something nihilistic and untamable is likely to keep breaking out of his pages.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The novel is not "a crazy quilt of bits"; it is a logical sequence of psychological events: the movements of stars may seem crazy ...to the simpleton, but wise men know the comets come back.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however naïve that may hav...e been, it was a good deal less naïve than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits... depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have this very moment finished reading a novel called The Vicar of Wakefield [by Oliver Goldsmith].... It appears to me, to be i...mpossible any person could read this book through with a dry eye and yet, I don't much like it.... There is but very little story, the plot is thin, the incidents very rare, the sentiments uncommon, the vicar is contented, humble, pious, virtuous--but upon the whole the book has not at all satisfied my expectations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I said in my novel that the clergyman is a kind of human Sunday. Jones and I settled that my sister May was a kind of human Good F...riday and Mrs. Bovill an Easter Monday or some other Bank Holiday.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there--that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable pre...sence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The American novel tends to rest in contradictions and among extreme ranges of experience. When it attempts to resolve contradicti...ons, it does so in oblique, morally equivocal ways. As a general rule, it does so either in melodramatic actions or in pastoral idylls, although intermixed with both one may find the stirring instabilities of "American humor." These qualities constitute the uniqueness of that branch of the novelistic tradi tion which has flourished in this country. They help to account for the strong element of "romance" in the American "novel." By contrast, the English novel has followed a middle way. It is notable for its great practical sanity, its powerful, engrossing composition of wide ranges of experience into a moral centrality and equability of judgment. Oddity, distortion of personality, dislocations of normal life, recklessness of behavior--these the English novel has included. Yet the profound poetry of disorder we find in the American novel is missing, with rare exceptions, from the English.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Doubtless the main difference between the novel and the romance is the way in which they view reality. The novel renders reality c...losely and in comprehensive detail. It takes a group of people and sets them going about the business of life. We come to see these people in their real complexity of temperament and motive. Character is more important than action or plot, and probably the tragic or comic actions of the narrative will have the primary purpose of enhancing our knowledge of and feeling for an important character, a group of characters, or a way of life.... By contrast the romance, following distantly the medieval example, feels free to render reality in less volume and detail. It tends to prefer action to character, and action will be freer in a romance than in a novel, encountering, as it were, less resistance from reality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...A shadow now occasionally crossed my simple, sanguine, and life enjoying mind, a notion that I was never really going to accomp...lish those powerful literary works which would blow a noble trumpet to social generosity and noblesse oblige before the world. What? should I find myself always planning and never achieving ... a richly complicated and yet firmly unified novel?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »