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Lytton's Theories of Prose Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Harold H. Watts
Harold H. Watts*
Affiliation:
Purdue University
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Extract

In 1838 Lytton published in the Monthly Chronicle an essay entitled “On Art in Fiction.” This essay is ignored by those who have written on Lytton's narrative art; yet, as it is reprinted in the volume, Pamphlets and Sketches, it takes up thirty-five closely printed pages and deals explicitly with the various parts of the novelist's craft. In it Lytton defines, in terms that apply to prose fiction, the aims of art and the means by which the aims may be achieved. By 1838 he had written twelve novels. The essay represents an experienced novelist's conclusions about the potentialities of his chosen form; and, moreover, it provides us with a measuring stick to set up against his later if not his earlier novels.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , March 1935 , pp. 274 - 289
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1935

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References

1 Lytton made an earlier and much briefer attempt to codify the rules for the writing of fiction in a sketch, “On the Different Kinds of Prose Fictions …,” which is prefaced to The Disowned in the Works of Edward Lytton Bulwer, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1836) i, 118 ff. This sketch, dated July 20, 1835, to anticipate the points made in the later essay.

2 Pamphlets and Sketches, (Knebworth edition) xxxiv, 318.

3 Ibid., 319.

4 Ibid., 320.

5 Ibid., 320.

6 Ibid., 321.

7 Ibid., 321.

8 Ibid., 322.

9 Idem.

10 Ibid., 323.

11 Ibid., 324.

12 Ibid., 324.

13 Although Lytton said that the great examples of prose fiction would furnish him with his rules, he turns to the drama, where the effect of the sublime has been more often encompassed.

14 Pamphlets and Sketches, 326.

15 Idem.

16 Ibid., 326.

17 Athens (Knebworth edition) xxix, 520.

18 Pamphlets and Sketches, 328.

19 Idem.

20 Ibid., 329.

21 See infra Lytton's idea that a great novel may have both moral aim and moral tendency.

22 Pamphlets and Sketches, 331.

23 Idem.

24 Ibid., 330.

25 Idem.

26 Ibid., 331.

27 Idem.

28 Ibid., 331.

29 Ibid., 332.

30 Ibid., 334.

31 Idem.

32 Ibid., 335.

33 Idem.

34 Ibid., 340.

35 Athens, op. cit., 519.

36 Pamphlets and Sketches, 340.

37 Ibid., 342.

38 New Monthly Magazine, xxxii, 545.

39 A similar opposition of the two forms, drama and novel, appears in various German critical writing—notably in Book v, Chapter vii of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, a book that Lytton was constantly citing in his defense of metaphysical fictions. A comparison of the two theories will show that, though the English writer probably took his cue from Goethe, Lytton's working out of the distinction is the result of his own taste and experience.

40 Pamphlets and Sketches, 344.

41 Ibid., 345.—Lytton gives in his summary the essence of Schiller's remarks on catastrophe in the drama. The sentence in the Foreword to Fiesco reads: “Die wahre Katastrophe des Komplotts, worin der Graf durch einen unglücklichen Zufall am Ziel seiner Wünsche zu Grunde geht, musste durchaus verändert werden, denn die Natur des Dramas duldet den Finger des Ohngefährs oder der unmittelbaren Vorsehung nicht.”

42 Ibid., 346.

43 Ibid., 347.

44 Ibid. 348.

45 Ibid., 350.

46 Idem.

47 Ibid., 361.

48 Idem.

49 Ibid., 352.

50 Ibid., 351.

51 Ibid., 352.

52 Idem.