The_Novels_Focus_On_Inner_Experience_And_Everyday_Life

The Novels Focus On Inner Experience And Everyday Life Question 7: How does the novel as a genre politicize the domain of everyday life and inner experience' “The novel was the chief instrument by which older notions of social value (...) were displaced. (...) The novel played a powerful political role in its own way.” Richard Kroll summarizes here one of Nancy Armstrong’s main arguments in Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987) and this quote could also be the summary of this essay. The novel as a genre gained political importance for two reasons: Firstly, the improvement of what Kroll calls “literature’s material conditions” caused a growth of literacy in England. The novel emerged out and used this improvement to bring issues on the domain of everyday life and inner experience into public discussion, and thus to political importance. Secondly, as the essay question implies, there are genre specific features, which “make” the domain of everyday life and inner experience “political in tone” and give them political relevance. The change of the literature material conditions is significant, for the discussion how the domain of everyday life and inner experience won political importance through the novel. Ian Watt states in novel, life, political, everyday, inner, experience, family, catherine, one, reader, female, domain, thus, through, society, readers, northanger, monster, makes, jane, henry, books, between, austen, abbey, watt, time, since, power, particular, novels, ian, genre, about, world