Origin of subaltern novels its place and importance in literature

A glimpse

Abstract

Terry Eagleton in her book “The English Novel an Introduction” states that  a novel is a piece of prose fiction of a reasonable length…The truth is that the novel is a genre which resists exact definition…The point about the novel, however, is not just that it eludes definitions, but that it actively undermines them. It is less a genre than an anti-genre. It cannibalizes other literary modes and mixes the bits and pieces promiscuously together…You can find poetry and dramatic dialogue in the novel, along with epic, pastoral, satire, history, elegy, tragedy and any number of other literary modes. Virginia Woolf described it as ‘this most pliable of all forms’. It is the queen of literary genres in a rather less elevated sense of the word than one might hear around Buckingham Palace. The novel is an anarchic genre, since its rule is not to have rules. An anarchist is not just someone who breaks rules, but someone who breaks rules as a rule, and this is what the novel does too. Myths are cyclical and repetitive, while the novel appears excitingly unpredictable. In fact, the novel has a finite repertoire of forms and motifs.