Shaping the Verisimilitude: Moral Didacticism and Neoclassical Principles Responsible for the Rise of the English Novel?

The rise of the novel, a genre that received a status of popularity equal to that of Elizabethan drama during the Renaissance, is one of the three, along with Neoclassicism and Pre-Romanticism, major aspects of the eighteenth-century British literature. The typology of the eighteenth century novel is remarkable: picaresque novel, adventure novel, epistolary novel, sentimental novel, novel of manners, moral novel, comic novel, the anti-novel, and others. Like in the seventeenth century, the picaresque narrative remains popular and influential, and in English literature, in particular – along with moral and didactic purpose, neoclassical influence, and other thematically textualized aspects – it contributed to the rise of the novel as a distinct literary genre, a phenomenon that occurred in England much later than on the Continent. Or rather, the comic (including satirical) attitude, social concern, and moral didacticism – emerging from both picaresque tradition and neoclassical principles – and together with picaresque tradition and neoclassical principles – are responsible for the emergence of verisimilitude as the forming element responsible in turn for the rise of the literary system of the novel in the eighteenth century English literature. Among them, the present article attempts to emphasize the contribution to the occurring of this cultural and literary phenomenon by the neoclassical principles and the moral concern reflected in the novels.