Novels Are Older Than We Think

Guardian:

At university in the early 1970s, I was led to believe the novel originated in England in the 18th century, and no professor told me otherwise as I pursued my PhD in the 1980s. Sometimes Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe was mentioned as a prototype, but according to literary dogma the novel experienced a kind of virgin birth with Pamela, Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel of 1740. But outside the walls of academe, in those alternative classrooms called used bookshops, I kept coming across books that certainly looked like novels but obviously predated Pamela.

Read the whole story: Guardian

Comments

[mamacat]

09:44 PM on 07/26/2010

I too have been interested in this subject. Robinson Crusoe is indeed often listed as the first novel, but then we have to ignore Don Quixote, as c-tom has mentioned, and many other works of literature. In my days working in the library, we always treated Don Quixote as we would any other book-length work of fiction.

I have read that the oldest known piece of literature is "Gilgamesh," from what we today call Iraq. I would like to find the time to read it some day.

[PlayTOE]

02:16 AM on 07/25/2010

book length works of fiction = novels ... have been around a very long time.
Look at the Iliad and Odyssey, or a more familiar bit of fiction, the bible.

[EminemsRevenge]

04:47 PM on 07/24/2010

There were actually people in the BUSH administration cognizant of who James joyce WAS...didn't know there was a comic version of Ulysses!

[c-tom]

04:45 PM on 07/24/2010

I was amazed that many authorities state the first novels were written in eighteenth century England. I have never heard El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha called anything but a novel. So I guess The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600 will be my beach book this year

[BikeFreak]

02:01 AM on 07/24/2010

Well, we really do not realize how much the world lost when Cleopatra's Alexandria library burnt.

I am sure there were novels in there.

[wm1066]

12:00 PM on 07/23/2010

The Story of Sinhue is a ancient story of a court doctor in early Egyptian times, a hollywood movie was made in the 50's called the Egyptian, it was based on a book written in 1945 that was based on this story. I had heard this was the oldest form of the novel.

[BikeFreak]

01:59 AM on 07/24/2010

What?

The oldest form of the novel was written in 1945?

[wm1066]

11:49 AM on 07/24/2010

Snarky doesn't become you bikefreak. BTW before papyrus and the ability to write things down, stories were told in poetic form so they could be remembered in detail, this stopped the story from wondering, like playing the childs game Telephone where you whisper a story in someones ear and the last person has to voice the story and everyone laughs at how much it changes. But when you could write it down like the Story of Sinhue it gave it stability.