Audiobook
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FIRST MODERN NOVEL A.D. 1740
written by
Edmond Gosse
First printed in
The Great Events by Famous Historians
Volume XIII, 1905
Excerpt:
""Let me make the ballads of a nation," said Fletcher of Saltoun, "and I care not who makes the laws." The place which the ancient ballads held in forming the characters of the people is in our day more than filled by the novels. Everybody reads them, especially in the younger generation, and every character is more or less moulded by the sentiments and teachings they contain.
The novel has been almost entirely a modern English development. Two centuries ago our ancestors did not read fiction: they had practically none to read. So that the production of the first English novel in 1740, leading as it has to the present state of affairs, may fairly be counted a most important event in the history of our race. Nowadays ten thousand novels are published every year, and for some of these is claimed the enormous circulation of half a million copies.
There is nothing offensive to the dignity of literary history in acknowledging that the most prominent piece of work effected by literature in England during the eighteenth century is the creation—for it can be styled nothing less—of the modern novel. In the seventeenth century there had been a very considerable movement in the direction of prose fiction."
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