Novel and Emma
The Imperfect Heroin in Prose Fiction
There is one particular feature that sets the novel apart from any other literary genre. Literature has the ability to transport you into a world that is a product of individual imagination yet the realism expressed in the novel serves as a tool or road that leads to the emerging of conceived images. It is a time travel that has the ability to restore any period of growth in society and humanity in general. Many times we refer to the novel when deciphering morality and lifestyles of earlier centuries. Philosophers and writers hypothesized on the definition of this genre and how it differentiates from earlier works. Jane Austen wrote several books that have been studied for their content of realism. Emma depicts domestic realism that is expressed mainly through the heroin of the novel. Ian Watt, author of an acknowledged theory written on the novel, The Rise of the Novel wrote: "it (the novel) surely attempts to portray all the varieties of human experience, and not merely those suited to one particular literary perspective: the novel 's realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it" (Watt 364). Earlier works portrayed the lives of kings, gods, and heroes. Most aimed to serve with a moral or were of metaphysical value. There was a sense of transcendence into eternity. Philosophers of the aesthetics claimed only that which can transports us beyond time and space is a true work of art and this was what most writers of early literary works aspired, immortality. What sets the novel apart from this romantic view is its imitation of reality. The novel rejects the universal and embraces the particular; "the study of the particulars of experience by the individual investigator, who, ideally at least, is free from the body of past assumptions and traditional beliefs; and it has given a peculiar importance to semantics, to the problem of the nature of correspondence between words and
There is one particular feature that sets the novel apart from any other literary genre. Literature has the ability to transport you into a world that is a product of individual imagination yet the realism expressed in the novel serves as a tool or road that leads to the emerging of conceived images. It is a time travel that has the ability to restore any period of growth in society and humanity in general. Many times we refer to the novel when deciphering morality and lifestyles of earlier centuries. Philosophers and writers hypothesized on the definition of this genre and how it differentiates from earlier works. Jane Austen wrote several books that have been studied for their content of realism. Emma depicts domestic realism that is expressed mainly through the heroin of the novel. Ian Watt, author of an acknowledged theory written on the novel, The Rise of the Novel wrote: "it (the novel) surely attempts to portray all the varieties of human experience, and not merely those suited to one particular literary perspective: the novel 's realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it" (Watt 364). Earlier works portrayed the lives of kings, gods, and heroes. Most aimed to serve with a moral or were of metaphysical value. There was a sense of transcendence into eternity. Philosophers of the aesthetics claimed only that which can transports us beyond time and space is a true work of art and this was what most writers of early literary works aspired, immortality. What sets the novel apart from this romantic view is its imitation of reality. The novel rejects the universal and embraces the particular; "the study of the particulars of experience by the individual investigator, who, ideally at least, is free from the body of past assumptions and traditional beliefs; and it has given a peculiar importance to semantics, to the problem of the nature of correspondence between words and
Cited: Austen, Jane. Emma. Toronto, Ontario, 1900.