Gulliver's Travels and Silas Marner

             "By detailed reference to Gulliver's Travels and Silas Marner, identify characteristics of genre. What similarities and differences do the two texts present in terms of their form?"
             Genre is a French term meaning "type", "sort" or "kind". The literary category or types (for instance, the main literary genres are poetry, drama and prose narrative) to which the work belongs and with whose conventions or characteristics it might be compared. We become aware of genre through cultural experience. A genre can be a literary form like a novel. Gulliver's Travels and Silas Marner are both prose fictions however it is debatable whether they are novels in the conventional sense.
             Gulliver's Travels (1726) and Silas Marner (1861) were written over 100 years apart. Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels in the eighteenth century whereas George Eliot wrote Silas Marner in the nineteenth century. It was in the early years of the eighteenth century that the novel as we know it began to be written, this was the birth of the novel however many books of the time were not fully-fledged novels. The nineteenth century includes two periods, the Romantic and the Victorian, Eliot wrote Silas Marner in the Victorian period. There were three major movements of the period include naturalism, realism and symbolism. As Walter Allen writes in The English Novel, "Nothing that preceded it in the way of prose fiction can explain it. There were no classical models for it". (19)
             By the middle of the eighteenth century, the new form was still searching for identity, terminology and definition. One definition of the novel might be, an extended fictional prose narrative about realistic characters and events. Some characteristics of the novel are contemporaneity, creditability and probability, familiarity, individuality, coherence and unity of design, and 'unliterary' language. Creditability and p...

More Essays:

APA     MLA     Chicago
Gulliver's Travels and Silas Marner. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 08:54, March 28, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/5016.html