The Fall of Romance

The factor that marks the later decades of the seventeenth century off as a separate period in the history of the novel is the decline of heroic romance and the emergence of the shorter nouvelle, and around that a coherent body of critical doctrine. The theory which accompanied the rise of the nouvelle has a distinctively modern appearance. It is to a certain extent anti-romantic and seems to bear witness to a distinctive shift in sensibility in favour of the realistic modes of writing which were to develop during the following century. This impression is strengthened, moreover, by the fact that it was out of the word nouvelle that the English word novel developed, which suggests a continuous development from the one form to the other.KeywordsSocial PositionSeventeenth CenturyHuman CharacterModern ReaderNarrative FrameThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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