Qarshi davlat universiteti xorijiy tillar fakulteti ingliz tili va adabiyoti kafedrasi

 
Historical novel as a literary genre.
During the eighteenth century, the novel had evolved intoa wide-ranging genre. In the forty or 
so years after the French Revolution in 1789, novelists brought new themes, new approaches to 
the novel; and, in doing so, they raised it from the inferior level of critical esteem – ‘only a 

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novel’, as one of Jane Austen’s characters puts it – to the most significant, most popular, and 
most highly regarded genre of literary expression.
The intellectual climate of the time is reflected in the wide range of issues, themes, and 
settings which the novel was now beginning to encompass: high-class society contrasts with the 
primitive; national concerns with regional; male points of view with female; present with past, as 
more and more new subjects become the raw material for fiction. William Godwin’s Caleb 
Williams (1794), subtitled Things As They Are, is a novel of propaganda, but it contains 
elements of crime, detection, pursuit, and punishment which are remarkably innovative. It is one 
of the first novels to give a psychological portrait of character at the same time as illustrating 
conflicts of political ideals and beliefs. The subtitle of Hermsprong (1796) by Robert Bage, Man 
As He Is Not, and the title of his Man As He Is (1792), echo Godwin’s subtitle and show a 
similar concern to examine views and values in what can be seen as a more ‘truthful’, realistic 
way. The ‘truth’ in this case is found, as with much of Romantic poetry, in a return to nature. 
Hermsprong is the novel which, more than any other, makes its hero a ‘natural’ man – a 
primitive, brought up by American Indians without the constrictions of civilised religion, 
morality, and ethics. It thus becomes a satire on the values which Hermsprong finds in the 
civilised society to which he returns. Many views – for example on social class and privilege, 
and on equality for women – are aired in ways which are critical of conventional English society.
Equality, and rights for women, had been the subject of discussion among educated 
women for several decades. In 1792, these views reached their most noted expression in Mary 
Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a work which was to have a lasting 
impact on future women thinkers and writers.
Walter Scott opened up the novel to the full panorama of revolution, dissent, rebellion and social 
change. Having written verse romances with great success for several years, he published his 
first novel only in 1814, at the very end of the Napoleonic wars when Britain was triumphant. 
And, equally significantly, the settings of his novels are in the past, rather than the immediate 
and highly troubled present. After the Napoleonic wars, Britain entered a time of severe social 
unrest, of high unemployment, of widening gaps between rich and poor, employers and workers, 
upper, middle and lower classes. These contemporary concerns, vividly espoused by writers 
from the poet Shelley to the social campaigner William Cobbett, are absent from Scott’s work. 
Scott does, however, use the historical framework of his novels to give a detailed portrait of 
turmoil. Most of the early Waverley novels, from Waverley (1814) to The Bride of Lammermoor 
(1819), are set in times of revolution and rebellion. There is an old-fashioned code of chivalry, 
which is fundamentally undermined, as the individual comes to terms with the changes in his 
world. By the end, most of Scott’s heroes or heroines have lived through traumatic times, close 
to what Britain had recently emerged from; and they have resolved not to be heroes. The system, 
the whole mechanism of society, the forces of history, are all greater than any individual, no 
matter how idealistic or heroic his aspirations. This leads to a kind of accommodation with 
history, which has given rise to the definition of the historical novel as ‘the epic of a world 
forsaken by God’.