earticle

영어

A while after the Elizabethan period that marks the modem age in England, a new literary medium called novel appeared above the literary horizon with hopes that the newly found desire for reading of the middle class public in England might be satisfied. The experiment was like pouring new wine into new wineskins. Thus began the 300-year long history of the English novel. What this study aims is to show how the English novel has made its way from a stylistical point of view, pursuing the biological development: embryonic, blooming, fruitful, and reaping periods. Such stylistic concepts as diegesis, mimesis, fabula, sjuzet, focalization, and foregrounding are used for textual and contextual analyses of the couple of major works of the principal writers who are considered to represent each of the four periods. The principal writer for the embryonic period is Defoe while the blooming period covers more forerunners like Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne. The fruitful period sees far more diverse novelists such as Austen, Dickens, Eliot, James and Conrad. The final period seems to be glorified by the existence of two virtuoso, Joyce and Woolf, who seem to have reached the artistic zenith through the stylistic experiment called 'stream of consciousness'. Their major works are so outstanding that we can hardly find any matches in this age of postmodernism.