narratee The imagined person whom the *narrator is assumed to be addressing in a given *narrative. The narratee is a notional figure within the ‘space’ of the *text itself, and is thus not to be confused either with the real reader or with the *implied reader (who is addressed by the *implied author at a separate ‘level’). Narratees are often hard to identify clearly, since they are not usually described or characterized explicitly. In some works, though, they appear as minor characters, especially in a *frame story (e.g. the Wedding Guest in Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’), and in some they even function as narrators as well: Lockwood, the narratee of Nelly’s *embedded narratives in Wuthering Heights, is the narrator of the story as a whole.
narration The process of relating a sequence of events; or another term for a *narrative. In the first sense, narration is often distinguished from other kinds of writing (*dialogue, description, commentary) which may be included in a narrative; it is also distinguished from the events recounted, i.e. from the *story, and from the narrative itself. Verb: narrate.
narrative [na-ră-tiv] A telling of some true or fictitious event or connected sequence of events, recounted by a *narrator to a *narratee (although there may be more than one of each). Narratives are to be distinguished from descriptions of qualities, states, or situations, and also from dramatic enactments of events (although a dramatic work may also include narrative speeches). A narrative will consist of a set of events (the *story) recounted in a process of narration (or *discourse), in which the events are selected and arranged in a particular order (the *plot). The category of narratives includes both the shortest accounts of events (e.g. the cat sat on the mat, or a brief news item) and the longest historical or biographical works, diaries, travelogues, etc., as well as novels, ballads, epics, short stories, and other fictional forms. In the study of fiction, it is usual to divide novels and shorter stories into *first-person narratives and *third-person narratives. As an adjective, ‘narrative’ means ‘characterized by or relating to story-telling’: thus narrative technique is the method of telling stories, and narrative poetry is the class of poems (including ballads, epics, and verse romances) that tell stories, as distinct from dramatic and *lyric poetry. Some theorists of *narratology have attempted to isolate the quality or set of properties that distinguishes narrative from non-narrative writings: this is called narrativity.
Further reading: Michael J. Toolan, Narrative (2nd edn, 2001).
narratology A term used since 1969 to denote the branch of literary study devoted to the analysis of *narratives, and more specifically of forms of narration and varieties of *narrator. Narratology as a modern theory is associated chiefly with European *structuralism, although older studies of narrative forms and devices, as far back as Aristotle’s Poetics (4th century bce) can also be regarded as narratological works. Modern narratology may be dated from Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1928), with its theory of narrative *functions.
Further reading: Mieke Bal, Narratology (3rd edn, 2009).
• Living Handbook of Narratology: reference resource at Hamburg University, offering full articles on key concepts.
narrator [nă-ray-ter] One who tells, or is assumed to be telling, the story in a given *narrative. In modern analysis of fictional narratives, the narrator is the imagined ‘voice’ transmitting the story, and is distinguished both from the real author (who may have written other tales with very different narrators) and from the *implied author (who does not recount the story, but is inferred as the authority responsible for selecting it and inventing a narrator for it). Narrators vary according to their degree of participation in the story: in *first-person narratives they are involved either as witnesses or as participants in the events of the story, whereas in *third-person narratives they stand outside those events; an *omniscient narrator stands outside the events but has special privileges such as access to characters’ unspoken thoughts, and knowledge of events happening simultaneously in different places. Narrators also differ in the degree of their overtness: some are given noticeable characteristics and personalities (as in first-person narratives and in some third-person narratives; see intrusive narrator), whereas ‘covert’ narrators are identified by no more than a ‘voice’ (as in most third-person narratives). Further distinctions are made between reliable narrators, whose accounts of events we are obliged to trust, and *unreliable narrators, whose accounts may be partial, ill-informed, or otherwise misleading: most third-person narrators are reliable, but some first-person narrators are unreliable. In a dramatic work, a narrator is a performer who recounts directly to the audience a summary of events preceding or during a scene or act. See also point of view.
naturalism A more deliberate kind of *realism in novels, stories, and plays, usually involving a view of human beings as passive victims of natural forces and social environment. As a literary movement, naturalism was initiated in France by Jules and Edmond Goncourt with their novel Germinie Lacerteux (1865), but it came to be led by Émile Zola, who claimed a ‘scientific’ status for his studies of impoverished characters miserably subjected to hunger, sexual obsession, and hereditary defects in Thérèse Raquin (1867), Germinal (1885), and many other novels. Naturalist fiction aspired to a sociological objectivity, offering detailed and fully researched investigations into unexplored corners of modern society—railways in Zola’s La Bête humaine (1890), the department store in his Au Bonheur des dames (1883)—while enlivening this with a new sexual sensationalism. Other novelists and storytellers associated with naturalism include Alphonse Daudet and Guy de Maupassant in France, Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris in the United States, and George Moore and George Gissing in England; the most significant work of naturalism in English being Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900). In the theatre, Henrik Ibsen’s play Ghosts (1881), with its stress on heredity, encouraged an important tradition of dramatic naturalism led by August Strindberg, Gerhart Hauptmann, and Maxim Gorky; in a somewhat looser sense, the realistic plays of Anton Chekhov are sometimes grouped with the naturalist phase of European drama at the turn of the century. The term naturalistic in drama usually has a broader application, denoting a very detailed illusion of real life on the stage, especially in speech, costume, and sets. See also verisimilitude, verismo.
Further reading: David Baguley, Naturalist Fiction (1990).
negative capability The phrase used by the English poet John Keats to describe the quality of selfless receptivity necessary to a true poet. In a letter to his brothers (December 1817), he writes He goes on to criticize Coleridge for not being ‘content with half knowledge’; and in later letters complains of the ‘egotistical’ and philosophical bias of Wordsworth’s poetry. By negative capability, then, Keats seems to have meant a poetic capacity to efface one’s own mental identity by immersing it sympathetically and spontaneously within the subject described, as Shakespeare was thought to have done.
at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.
négritude [nay-gri-tood] The slogan (literally ‘negro-ness’) of a cultural movement launched by black students in Paris in 1932, subsequently influencing many black writers, especially in the French-speaking world. The movement aimed to reassert traditional African cultural values against the French colonial policy of assimilating blacks into white culture. Its two most important figures were the Senegalese poet and politician Léopold Sédar Senghor and the Martiniquan poet and politician Aimé Césaire, and its literary masterpiece is Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1938). Senghor defined négritude very broadly as ‘the sum total of the values of the civilization of the African world,’ understood in terms of ‘intuitive reason’ and ‘cosmic rhythm’. The influential journal Présence Africaine, founded in 1947, promoted this ideal. A later, more politically radical generation of black writers, however, questioned the movement’s limited aims: as Wole Soyinka wrote, ‘the tiger does not proclaim his tigritude—he pounces’.
Further reading: Lilyan Kesteloot, Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Négritude (1991).
nemesis [nem-ĭ-sis] (plural -eses) Retribution or punishment for wrongdoing; or the agent carrying out such punishment, often personified as Nemesis, a minor Greek goddess responsible for executing the vengeance of the gods against erring humans. The term is applied especially to the retribution meted out to the *protagonist of a *tragedy for his or her insolence or *hubris. See also poetic justice.
neoclassicism The literary principle according to which the writing and *criticism of poetry and drama were to be guided by rules and precedents derived from the best ancient Greek and Roman authors; a codified form of *classicism that dominated French literature in the 17th and 18th centuries, with a significant influence on English writing, especially from c.1660 to c.1780. In a more general sense, often employed in contrast with *Romanticism, the term has also been used to describe the characteristic world-view or value-system of this ‘Age of Reason’, denoting a preference for rationality, clarity, restraint, order, and *decorum, and for general truths rather than particular insights. In its more immediately literary sense as a habitual deference to Greek and Roman models in literary theory and practice, neoclassicism emerged from the rediscovery of Aristotle’s Poetics (4th century bce) by Italian scholars in the 16th century, notably by J. C. Scaliger, whose dogmatic interpretation of the dramatic *unities in his Poetica (1561) profoundly affected the course of French drama. Along with Aristotle’s theory of poetry as imitation and his classification of *genres, the principles of the Roman poet Horace as expounded in his Ars Poetica (c.20 bce) dominated the neoclassical or neoclassic view of literature: these included the principle of decorum by which the style must suit the subject-matter, and the belief that art must both delight and instruct. The central assumption of neoclassicism was that the ancient authors had already attained perfection, so that the modern author’s chief task was to imitate them—the imitation of Nature and the imitation of the ancients amounting to the same thing. Accordingly, the approved genres of classical literature—*epic, *tragedy, *comedy, *elegy, *ode, *epistle, *eclogue, *epigram, *fable, and *satire—were adopted as the favoured forms in this period. The most influential summary of neoclassical doctrine is Boileau’s verse treatise L’Art poétique (1674); its equivalent in English is Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1711). In England, neoclassicism reached its height in the *Augustan Age, when its general view of the world was presented memorably in Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–4). Some modern critics refer to the period 1660–1780 in England as the ‘Neoclassical period’, but as an inclusive label this is misleading in that one very important development in this period—the emergence of the *novel—falls outside the realm of neoclassicism, there being no acknowledged classical model for the new form.
Further reading: Craig A. Kallendorf (ed.), A Companion to the Classical Tradition (2007).
neologism [ni-ol-ŏ-jizm] A word or phrase newly invented or newly introduced into a language. Verb: neologize. See also coinage, nonce word, portmanteau word.
Neoplatonism A philosophical and religious system that both rivalled and influenced Christianity from the 3rd to the 6th century, and was derived from the work of the Greek philosopher Plato (427–347 bce) along with elements of oriental mysticism. The founder of Neoplatonism was Plotinus (205–270 ce), who constructed an elaborate hierarchy of spiritual levels through which the individual soul could ascend from physical existence to merge with the One. Interest in Neoplatonic philosophy, often associated with magic and demonology, was revived in the *Renaissance. See also platonism.
neo-realism Any revival of *realism in fiction, especially in novels and stories describing the lives of the poor in a contemporary setting. The term is associated especially with the dominant trend of Italian fiction in the 1940s and 1950s, led by Cesare Pavese, Alberto Moravia, and Elio Vittorini, and with the parallel movement in Italian cinema of the same period, led by Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio de Sica. See also verismo.
neuronovel (syndrome novel) A term coined by the journalist-critic Marco Roth in a 2009 magazine article, ‘The Rise of the Neuronovel’, to describe a number of recent British and American novels in which leading characters are affected and largely defined by neurological disorders. The principal cases are Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (1997), in which one character suffers from de Clérambault’s syndrome; Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (1999), in which the narrator has Tourette’s syndrome; Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2001), told by an autistic narrator; McEwan’s Saturday (2005), featuring a neurosurgeon who recognizes another character’s hostile manner as symptomatic of Huntingdon’s chorea; and Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker (2006), about a case of Capgras syndrome. Jonathan Franzen’s family novel The Corrections (2001), in which the father has Parkinsonism, is sometimes referred to as another of these ‘syndrome’ novels.
Although such afflictions as amnesia and multiple-personality disorder had been used before as plot devices in popular thrillers, and Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog (2003) likewise transforms its protagonist’s personality by means of a brain injury, the neuronovel draws more directly on neuroscientific ideas of cognition. Unlike the novel of ideas, in which questions of cognition and consciousness may arise in discussion (as they do, for example, in David Lodge’s *campus novel Thinks…(2002)), the neuronovel incorporates elements of neuroscientific knowledge into its constructions of character and sometimes its narrative perspective. The phenomenon appears to arise from the growing prestige and intellectual resonance of cognitive science since the 1980s, which entered the literary world through such works as neurologist Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985).
Further reading: T. J. Lustig and James Peacock (eds), Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: The Syndrome Syndrome (2013).
New Apocalypse A short-lived literary movement that emerged in Britain between 1938 and 1943, announced by the appearance of an anthology of essays, poems, and stories, The New Apocalypse, in 1939. Dylan Thomas, who was not an active member of the Apocalypse group, contributed one poem and one story (each of which had already appeared elsewhere), but the dominant figures were J. F. Hendry, Henry Treece, Dorian Cooke, and Norman McCaig (later known as MacCaig). Hendry’s Introduction declared that Apocalyptic writing was concerned with ‘the collapse of social forms and the emergence of new and more organic ones.…it occurs where expression breaks through the structure of language to become more organic’, and expressed the hope of replacing the bankrupt systems of contemporary politics, philosophy, and even science with a new conception of ‘the wholeness of man’. The Apocalypse writers saw themselves as continuing the aims of *surrealism in cultivating the power of the unconscious mind, and its poetry is often violently mythological. Two further anthologies appeared, The White Horseman (1941) and The Crown and the Sickle (1943), but the group was dispersed by war service and eventually blended into the larger current of 1940s writing that became known as the ‘New Romanticism’, in which Thomas was the most prominent figure.
Further reading: A. T. Tolley, The Poetry of the Forties (1985).
New Comedy The name given to the kind of *comedy that superseded the *Old Comedy of Aristophanes in Athens from the late 4th century bce, providing the basis for later Roman comedy and eventually for the comic theatre of Molière and Shakespeare. Preceded by a phase of ‘middle comedy’ (of which almost nothing has survived), New Comedy abandoned topical *satire in favour of fictional plots based on contemporary life: these portrayed the tribulations of young lovers caught up among *stock characters such as the miserly father and the boastful soldier. The *chorus was reduced to a musical interlude. The chief exponent of New Comedy was Menander, of whose many works only one complete play, Dyskolos (The Bad-Tempered Man, 317 bce), survives, along with several fragments. Greek New Comedy was further adapted and developed in Rome by Plautus and Terence in the early 2nd century bce. See also romantic comedy.
New Criticism A movement in American literary *criticism from the 1930s to the 1960s, concentrating on the verbal complexities and ambiguities of short poems considered as self-sufficient objects without attention to their origins or effects. The name comes from John Crowe Ransom’s book The New Criticism (1941), in which he surveyed the theories developed in England by T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, and William Empson, together with the work of the American critic Yvor Winters. Ransom called for a more ‘objective’ criticism focusing on the intrinsic qualities of a work rather than on its biographical or historical context; and his students Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren had already provided a very influential model of such an approach in their college textbook Understanding Poetry (1938), which helped to make New Criticism the academic orthodoxy for the next twenty years. Other critics grouped under this heading, despite their differences, include Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, W. K. Wimsatt Jr, and Kenneth Burke. Influenced by T. S. Eliot’s view of poetry’s *autotelic status, and by the detailed *semantic analyses of I. A. Richards in Practical Criticism (1929) and Empson in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), the American New Critics repudiated ‘extrinsic’ criteria for understanding poems, dismissing them under such names as the *affective fallacy and the *intentional fallacy. Moreover, they sought to overcome the traditional distinction between *form and *content: for them, a poem was ideally an ‘organic unity’ in which tensions were brought to equilibrium. Their favoured terms of analysis—*irony, *paradox, *imagery, *metaphor, and *symbol—tended to neglect questions of *genre, and were not successfully transferred to the study of dramatic and *narrative works. Many later critics—often unsympathetic to the New Critics’ Southern religious conservatism—accused them of cutting literature off from history, but their impact has in some ways been irreversible, especially in replacing biographical source-study with text-centred approaches. The outstanding works of New Criticism are Brooks’s The Well-Wrought Urn (1947) and Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon (1954).
New Formalism (Neoformalism) A movement in American poetry of the 1980s and 1990s that returned, after the prolonged dominance of *free verse, to traditional *metres, *stanza forms, *rhyme, logical syntax, and comprehensible narrative or discursive exposition. There were a number of distinguished ‘old’ formalist poets writing at that time, including Anthony Hecht, Howard Nemerov, Richard Wilbur, and Donald Justice (of whom the last three contributed to the inaugural issue of the Neoformalist magazine The Formalist in 1990); but the label was applied to recently emerging poets who had been born after 1940, especially to Timothy Steele, Dana Goia, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Mark Jarman, Brad Leithauser, Marilyn Hacker, and Vikram Seth, most of whom published notable collections in the mid-1980s. The movement’s origins may be traced to the launch in 1980 by Jarman and Robert McDowell of The Reaper, a magazine dedicated to formal verse and *narrative verse (the movement overlaps with a revival of narrative verse sometimes called the ‘New Narrative’). There followed two significant anthologies, Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms (ed. P. Dacey and D. Jauss, 1986) and The Direction of Poetry (ed. R. Richman, 1988), along with some critical defences of the Neoformalist position, most notably Goia’s essay ‘Notes on the New Formalism’ (1987), in which he declares ‘the bankruptcy of the *confessional mode’, and Steele’s book Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter (1990), which regrets the wrong turn taken by *modernism. An important later anthology is Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism (ed. M. Jarman and D. Mason, 1996).
Further reading: Robert McPhillips, The New Formalism (2005).
new historicism A term applied to a trend in American academic literary studies in the 1980s that emphasized the historical nature of literary texts and at the same time (in contrast with older *historicisms) the ‘textual’ nature of history. As part of a wider reaction against purely formal or linguistic critical approaches such as the *New Criticism and *deconstruction, the new historicists, led by Stephen Greenblatt, drew new connections between literary and non-literary texts, breaking down the familiar distinctions between a text and its historical ‘background’ as conceived in established historical forms of criticism. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s concepts of *discourse and power, they attempted to show how literary works are implicated in the power-relations of their time, not as secondary ‘reflections’ of any coherent world-view but as active participants in the continual remaking of meanings. New historicism is less a system of interpretation than a set of shared assumptions about the relationship between literature and history, and an essayistic style that often develops general reflections from a startling historical or anthropological anecdote. Greenblatt’s books Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) and Shakespearean Negotiations (1988) are the exemplary models. Other scholars of *Early Modern (‘Renaissance’) culture associated with him include Jonathan Goldberg, Stephen Orgel, Lisa Jardine, and Louis Montrose. The term has been applied to similar developments in the study of *Romanticism, such as the work of Jerome McGann and Marjorie Levinson. A major concern of new historicism, following Foucault, is the cultural process by which subversion or dissent is ultimately contained by ‘power’.
Further reading: John Brannigan, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (1998).
New Humanism The slogan of a small but influential group of American critics in the 1920s and 1930s, led by Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, and including among its champions Norman Foerster and (for a short period before defecting to an incompatible position) Stuart P. Sherman. It derived its concept of humanism and many of its literary principles from the critical writings of Matthew Arnold, upholding an ethical doctrine of self-restraint in place of formal religious doctrine and opposing the excessive individualism of the *Romantic tradition in the name of *classical order and harmony. It was especially hostile to the Romantic cult of nature, and tended to blame the nationalism exhibited in the First World War upon Romantic forms of irrationalism. Its principal joint publication was a book of essays, Humanism and America (1930) edited by Foerster, who in the same year published his own book, Towards Standards; but its positions can be seen to have developed from earlier writings including some of More’s essays in his long sequence of Shelburne Essays (11 vols, 1904–21) and Babbitt’s books Rousseau and Romanticism (1919) and Democracy and Leadership (1924). Among its more sceptical followers was T. S. Eliot, who had studied under Babbitt and sympathized with his anti-Romantic principles but came to regard the New Humanism as incoherent because lacking in secure religious foundations.
Further reading: Thomas R. Nevin, Irving Babbitt (1984).
New Journalism The name given to two distinct developments in modern journalism, the first in Britain in the 1880s, the second in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. The original New Journalism involved a successful attempt to make news more appealing to readers, both in content and presentation, with stronger emphasis on ‘human interest’ angles and interviews in more concise articles, the columns of print being broken up by cross-heads and illustrations. This new style was pioneered by W. T. Stead at the Pall Mall Gazette from 1886 and T. P. O’Connor at The Star (from 1888), and became the norm in the early 20th century.
Of more direct literary interest, the later American movement involved a new blend of fictional presentation with journalistic research and reportage. The first important example, which provoked controversy about its techniques and credibility (was it fiction, ‘*faction’, ‘non-fiction novel’ or highly subjective feature story?), was Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), an account of a murder case in Kansas, presented in novelistic form but based on journalistic research and interviews. Other major examples in the late 1960s were Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels (1967, about motorbike gangs), Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968, about the drug subcultures of California), and Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night (1968, about protests against the Vietnam War). Wolfe’s anthology-cum-*manifesto, The New Journalism (1973), justified its imaginative methods on the grounds that the objectivity of orthodox journalism was illusory; and he continued the tradition in The Right Stuff (1979, about the world of astronauts) and other works. Thompson’s unusual blend of fact and fiction, which he called ‘gonzo journalism’, is characterized by sequences of unbelievable drug consumption and grotesque hallucination, notably in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), a novel in which the journalist narrator fails to cover a motorbike race and a legal convention on narcotics because he and his attorney are deranged by their superhuman intake of illegal substances. Among other important examples are Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977), a widely admired account of the strange unreality of the Vietnam War, and the essays of Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), both partly about Californian subcultures. A central implication of this movement was that American actuality in the age of Vietnam and the Watergate scandal had become far stranger than fiction, and required the artistic resources of the novelist to capture its enormities.
Further reading: Marc Weingarten, Who’s Afraid of Tom Wolfe? (2005).
New Woman writing A body of fiction and drama concerning the ‘New Woman’, a type of self-assertive younger woman much discussed in the British press in the 1890s and the early *Edwardian period as the focus for public debates about marriage and women’s rights. The term was coined in an article in March 1894 by the feminist novelist Sarah Grand, and reappeared as the title of an anti-feminist satirical play The New Woman, by Sidney Grundy in September of that year, after which it stuck in the public mind as the term for independent-minded women seeking emancipation (or in unsympathetic eyes for misguided and ‘unwomanly’ women). As popularly caricatured, the New Woman was a hopelessly idealistic creature attempting to reverse accepted gender roles by taking the sexual initiative with men, smoking cigarettes, and immodestly riding bicycles. In literary works, however, she is more often a tragic victim of marriage laws, tied to a syphilitic or drunken husband. New Woman writing is usually seen as commencing in 1893 with the appearance of the short-story collection Keynotes by ‘George Egerton’ (Chavelita Dunne) and of Grand’s novel The Heavenly Twins. These works were followed by Mona Caird’s Daughters of Danaus (1894), by Grant Allen’s scandalous novel about an extramarital affair, The Woman Who Did (1895), by Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), and by many other fictions by women and men about loveless marriages and runaway wives. New Woman figures appeared in dramatic works too, as in Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith (1895) and Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession (published 1893, performed 1902). By the time of H. G. Wells’s novel Ann Veronica and St John Hankin’s play The Last of the De Mullins (both 1909), the self-possessed heroines of these works were familiar enough not to be ‘new’.
Further reading: Sally Ledger, The New Woman (1997).
New York Intellectuals The collective title given to an important group of American literary and cultural critics active in the period from the late 1930s to the 1960s, and associated with the periodical Partisan Review. The group was inspired by the example of the older critic Edmund Wilson, whose critical outlook in The Triple Thinkers (1938) and other works synthesized a semi-Marxist view of culture with sympathy for the achievements of literary *modernism and some interest in the implications of Freudian psychoanalysis. This combination of liberal-leftist (and emphatically anti-Stalinist) politics with concern for literature in its social and psychological contexts became characteristic of the group. The principal figures in its early phase were Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv, Delmore Schwartz, Alfred Kazin, Richard Chase, Diana Trilling, Mary McCarthy, and Dwight McDonald; they were joined at later stages by Irving Howe, Richard Poirier, Elizabeth Hardwick, Leslie Fiedler, and Susan Sontag, among others. Of these, Schwartz, McCarthy, and Hardwick are better known for their creative than for their critical works. Several of the Partisan Review critics made important contributions to the understanding of the American literary tradition in particular, as in Kazin’s On Native Grounds (1942), Rahv’s essay ‘Paleface and Redskin’ (1949), Chase’s The American Novel and its Tradition (1957), and Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (1960). Major representative works of the group include Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination (1951) and Rahv’s The Myth and the Powerhouse (1965).
Further reading: Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and their World (1986).
New York school Originally a term of art criticism applied in the 1950s and after to the group of abstract expressionist painters working in New York, including Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock; but the term was reapplied, at first by John Bernard Myers in a 1961 magazine article, to a group of contemporary poets active in the same city. The principal poets of the group were Frank O’Hara (1926–66), John Ashbery (1927–2017), Kenneth Koch (1925–2002), and James Schuyler (1922–91); others who came to be grouped with them included Ted Berrigan, Barbara Guest, and Harry Mathews. The transposition of the group term from painting to poetry is appropriate, since one of the common characteristics of these poets was an involvement with the world of visual arts: Ashbery was for many years an art critic by profession, and both O’Hara and Schuyler worked at the Museum of Modern Art. An interest in aesthetic problems posed by visual art is often evident in their poems, notably in Ashbery’s major long poem ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ (1975). As a distinctive group, they distanced themselves from what they felt to be the solemnity of their predecessors, especially T. S. Eliot and Robert Lowell, by cultivating tones of nonchalant colloquial informality and by showing appreciation of American popular cultural forms of music and cinema. Their work shows a variety of *modernist influences, particularly that of literary *surrealism.
Further reading: Geoff Ward, Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets (2nd edn, 2001).
Newgate novel A term applied to certain popular English novels of the 1830s that are based on legends of 18th-century highwaymen and other notorious criminals as recorded in the Newgate Calendar (c.1773). Edward Bulwer’s Paul Clifford (1830) and Eugene Aram (1832), along with W. H. Ainsworth’s Rookwood (1834) and Jack Sheppard (1840), were the principal examples, and all came under fierce attack from critics, including W. M. Thackeray, who accused them of encouraging crime. Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838) shares many features of Newgate fiction, but by stressing the squalor and misery of the criminal world it managed to escape the censure meted out to Ainsworth and Bulwer.
nō (noh) A traditional form of Japanese drama characterized by highly ritualized chant and gesture, and its use of masked actors. Combining music, dance, and speech in prose and verse, the nō play derives from religious rituals, and is performed by an all-male cast, originally for an aristocratic audience. More than 200 such plays survive from as early as the 14th century, mostly on religious and mythological subjects. English translations appeared in the early 20th century, influencing the work of Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, and Bertolt Brecht.
noir A term derived from French critical usage, both literary and cinematic, and applied in English to a kind of crime novel or *thriller characterized less by rational investigation (as in the classic *detective story) than by violence, treachery, and moral confusion. In French usage, film noir is a period style of 1940s and 1950s American movie thriller commonly adapted from *hard-boiled detective fiction (as in the film versions of The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, and others) and distinguished cinematically by the use of menacing shadows and camera angles, while the roman noir (a term once applied to *Gothic novels) is broadly equivalent to the thriller. Although noir fiction derives in important ways from the hard-boiled school of detective writing and overlaps with it at some points (especially in the case of James M. Cain’s work), it can be distinguished from most detective stories and from other kinds of thriller by its powerful tendency to dissolve orderly distinctions between the roles of criminal and hero: thus in Cain’s Double Indemnity (1936) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), the protagonists are lured into murder by sexual obsession. In noir fiction generally, rational detachment is overwhelmed by criminal temptation and bewildered by multiple deceptions, and the reader is commonly invited to adopt the point of view of a murderer or of an accessory to serious crime. Leading practitioners include Jim Thompson (e.g. The Killer Inside Me, 1952), Patricia Highsmith (in The Talented Mr Ripley, 1955, and its sequels), and James Ellroy (e.g. The Black Dahlia, 1987).
Further reading: Lee Horsley, The Noir Thriller (2001).
nom de plume A pen-name, i.e. a pseudonym under which a writer’s work is published, as Marian Evans’s novels appeared under the name of ‘George Eliot’.
nonce word A word invented to be used for a single specific occasion; or an old word of which only one occurrence has been found. See also coinage, neologism, portmanteau word.
nonsense verse A kind of humorous poetry that amuses by deliberately using strange non-existent words and illogical ideas. Its masters in English are Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, followed by G. K. Chesterton and Ogden Nash. Classics of the genre are Lear’s ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’ (1871) and his *limericks, along with the songs in Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1871), including ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ and the celebrated ‘Jabberwocky’. See also doggerel, jingle, light verse.
nouveau roman, le [noo-voh roh-mah n] The French term (‘new novel’) applied since the mid-1950s to experimental novels by a group of French writers who rejected many of the traditional elements of novel-writing, such as the sequential *plot and the analysis of characters’ motives. The leading light of this group was Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose essays on the novel in Pour un nouveau roman (1963) argue for a neutral registering of sensations and things rather than an interpretation of events or a study of characters: these principles were put into practice most famously in his *anti-novel La Jalousie (1957). Other notable nouveaux romans include Nathalie Sarraute’s Le Planétarium (1959) and Michel Butor’s La Modification (1957); Sarraute’s Tropismes (1938) is often cited as the first nouveau roman.
Further reading: Ann Jefferson, The Nouveau Roman and the Poetics of Fiction (1980).
NOVEL
Nearly always an extended fictional prose *narrative, although some novels are very short, some are non-fictional, some have been written in verse, and some do not even tell a story. Such exceptions help to indicate that the novel as a literary *genre is itself exceptional: it disregards the constraints that govern other literary forms, and acknowledges no obligatory structure, style, or subject-matter. Thriving on this openness and flexibility, the novel has become the most important literary genre of the modern age, superseding the *epic, the *romance, and other narrative forms. Novels can be distinguished from *short stories and *novellas by their greater length, which permits fuller, subtler development of characters and themes. (Confusingly, it is a shorter form of tale, the Italian novella, that gives the novel its name in English.) There is no established minimum length for a novel, but it is normally at least long enough to justify its publication in an independent volume, unlike the short story. The novel differs from the prose romance in that a greater degree of *realism is expected of it, and that it tends to describe a recognizable secular social world, often in a sceptical and prosaic manner inappropriate to the marvels of romance. The novel has frequently incorporated the structures and languages of non-fictional prose forms (history, autobiography, journalism, travel writing), even to the point where the non-fictional element outweighs the fictional. It is normally expected of a novel that it should have at least one character, and preferably several characters shown in processes of change and social relationship; a *plot, or some arrangement of narrated events, is another normal requirement. Special *subgenres of the novel have grown up around particular kinds of character (the *Künstlerroman, the spy novel), setting (the *historical novel, the *campus novel), and plot (the detective novel); while other kinds of novel are distinguished either by their structure (the *epistolary novel, the *picaresque novel) or by special emphases on character (the *Bildungsroman) or ideas (the *roman à thèse).
Although some ancient prose narratives like Petronius’ Satyricon (1st century ce) can be called novels, and although some significant forerunners of the novel—including François Rabelais’s Gargantua (1534)—appeared in the 16th century, it is the publication in Spain of the first part of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha in 1605 that is most widely accepted as announcing the arrival of the true novel. In France the inaugural landmark was Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678), while in England Daniel Defoe is regarded as the founder of the English novel with his Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722). The novel achieved its predominance in the 19th century, when Charles Dickens and other writers found a huge audience through serial publication, and when the conventions of realism were consolidated. In the 20th century a division became more pronounced between the popular forms of novel and the various experiments of *modernism and *postmodernism—from the *stream of consciousness to the *anti-novel; but repeated reports of the ‘death of the novel’ have been greatly exaggerated. Adjective: novelistic. See also fiction.
Further reading: Jeremy Hawthorn, Studying the Novel (6th edn, 2010); David Lodge, The Art of Fiction (1992).
novelette A trivial or cheaply sensational novel or *romance; or (in a neutral sense, especially in the USA) a short novel or extended short story, i.e. a *novella. The adjective novelettish carries the unfavourable connotations of the first sense.
novella [nŏ-vel-ă] A fictional tale in prose, intermediate in length and complexity between a *short story and a *novel, and usually concentrating on a single event or chain of events, with a surprising turning point. Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ (1902) is a fine example; Henry James and D. H. Lawrence also favoured the novella form. The term comes from the Italian word novella (‘novelty’; plural novelle), which was applied to the much shorter stories found in Boccaccio’s Decameron (1349–53), until it was borrowed at the end of the 18th century by Goethe and other writers in Germany, where the novella (German, *Novelle) in its modern sense became established as an important literary *genre. In France it is known as the nouvelle. See also conte, novelette.
Novelle [no-vel-ĕ] (plural -ellen) The German term for a fictional prose tale that concentrates on a single event or situation, usually with a surprising conclusion. The term, adopted from the Italian (see novella), was introduced in 1795 by J. W. von Goethe. The outstanding German tradition of Novellen includes works by Tieck, Kleist, and Thomas Mann, most of which conform (in terms of length) to the English sense of ‘novella’.
numbers A term—now obsolete—formerly applied to poetry in general, by association with the counting of feet or syllables in regular verse *metres.
nursery rhyme A traditional verse or set of verses chanted to infants by adults as an initiation into rhyme and verbal rhythm. Most are hundreds of years old, and derive from songs, proverbs, riddles, *ballads, street cries, and other kinds of composition originally intended for adults, which have become almost meaningless outside their original contexts. Their exact origins are often obscure, although a few more recent examples are by known authors: ‘Mary had a little lamb’ was written by Sarah Josepha Hale in 1830. See also jingle, nonsense verse.