DIY History | Transcribe | Scholarship at Iowa | The Ethical Tendency of the English Novel by Helen M. Harney, 1897 | The Ethical Tendency of the English Novel by Helen M. Harney, 1897, Page 14

Transcribe
Translate

The Ethical Tendency of the English Novel by Helen M. Harney, 1897

The Ethical Tendency of the English Novel by Helen M. Harney, 1897, Page 14

a book should have a definite purpose, a real reason for being, if it expects a long life.
Before the novel, the poem afforded our intellectual ancestors this means of amusement and in early English poetry the moral element was seldom lacking; and when fiction took the place of poetry as an intellectual amusement, the same principle held good. It so happened that the growth of the English novel began when English society and religion were in a degraded state, but in the indecency and coarseness of the novel of the eighteenth century there still appears something that is not French, not Italian, not Spanish. Until the middle of the eighteenth century, the novels were written merely for pleasure. "Bold bawdry and open manslaughter," says Ascham, were their themes in the Elizabethan Age it was no until the works of
11.

Saving...

a book should have a definite purpose, a real reason for being, if it expects a long life. Before the novel, the poem afforded our intellectual ancestors this means of amusement and in early English poetry the moral element was seldom lacking; and when fiction took the place of poetry as an intellectual amusement, the same principle held good. It so happened that the growth of the English novel began when English society and religion were in a degraded state, but in the indecency and coarseness of the novel of the eighteenth century there still appears something that is not French, not Italian, not Spanish. Until the middle of the eighteenth century, the novels were written merely for pleasure. "Bold bawdry and open manslaughter," says Ascham, were their themes in the Elizabethan Age it was no until the works of 11.