Social novel

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The social novel is a genre of the novel in which the social life of people and their interaction with nature and society is portrayed.

The social novel differs from the historical novel in that it depicts contemporary conditions and development processes . In contrast to the Bildungsroman and the biographical novel, less space is given to the development of events. Rather, more attention is paid to the sub-elements, regardless of their function and objective value. The social novel in its origins presupposes a differentiated society or is based on epochal restructuring.

Epochs of the social novel

Daniel Defoe , Henry Fielding , Samuel Richardson , Laurence Sterne and Tobias Smollett created the basis for the social novel, the beginnings of which date back to the 18th century in England , by realistically depicting the increasingly developing English bourgeois society.

In the 19th century, the social novel became an important instrument of critical realism in France . Émile Zola , Gustave Flaubert , Honoré de Balzac and Stendhal played a key role in the further development of the social novel. In connection with the social novel, the division of the novels also developed during this time. Cycle , trilogy and tetralogy became popular design methods. In German literature, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe tried to expand the genre of the educational novel into a social novel with Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre in 1821 . Representatives of the 19th century are Karl Immermann , Karl Gutzkow , Gustav Freytag and Theodor Fontane . In Spain, the social novel was cultivated by Benito Pérez Galdós , Miguel de Unamuno and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez . In Italy authors such as Giovanni Verga , Luigi Pirandello , Italo Svevo and Curzio Malaparte stood out in particular.

With the claim to depict the social totality of the present in a panoramic way, to narrate it in many dimensions and to some extent simultaneously, Karl Gutzkow developed the model of a “novel of side by side” in his foreword to Die Ritter vom Geiste (1850).

After the First World War , mainly bourgeois-humanist writers such as Robert Musil , Thomas Mann , Joseph Roth , Hermann Broch and Heimito von Doderer made use of the genre in German-speaking countries .

In 2010, Martin Kluger described the DVD box for the TV series The Wire as a social novel.

Big city novel as a special form

The city novel is a special form of the social novel. Early examples are The Notes of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) by Rilke , in which experiences of a foreigner in Paris with the artist's existential homelessness oscillate, and Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) by Alfred Döblin , who was influenced by Andrei Bely's novel “Petersburg”. In Travelers on One Leg (1989), Herta Müller rewrites the genre in the modernist tradition, including montage , from the perspective of a foreign German-speaking person in the Federal Republic of the 1980s, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall , and above all from the perspective of a strange woman .

The Canadian Gabrielle Roy lived in major European cities for several years and returned to Montréal because of the war in 1939 . She shaped her experience of big city life literarily in her main work Bonheur d'occasion , 1945, and in Alexandre Chenevert, caissier , 1954.

Examples

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Richard Kämmerlings: A Balzac for Our Time , faz.net , May 14, 2010
  2. ^ A b Antje Harnisch: "Foreigner Abroad". Herta Müller's travelers on one leg , in: Monthly books for German lessons, German language and literature , 89 (1997), 4, pp. 507-520.