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NOVEL OF MANNERS
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Novel of manners
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BY The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica View Edit History
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Novel of manners, work of fiction that re-creates a social world, conveying with finely detailed observation the customs, values, and mores of a highly developed and complex society.
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Key People: Fanny Burney Ferenc Herczeg
Related Topics: Novel
The conventions of the society dominate the story, and characters are differentiated by the degree to which they measure up to the uniform standard, or ideal, of behaviour or fall below it. The range of a novel of manners may be limited, as in the works of Jane Austen, which deal with the domestic affairs of English country gentry families of the 19th century and ignore elemental human passions and larger social and political determinations. It may also be sweeping, as in the novels of Balzac, which mirror the 19th century in all its complexity in stories dealing with Parisian life, provincial life, private life, public life, and military life.
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novel: The novel of manners
To make fiction out of the observation of social behaviour is sometimes regarded as less worthy than...
Notable writers of the novel of manners from the end of the 19th century into the 20th include Henry James, Evelyn Waugh, Edith Wharton, and John Marquand.
This article was most recently revised and updated by J.E. Luebering, Executive Editorial Director.
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ROBINSONADE
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Robinsonade
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BY The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica View Edit History
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Robinsonade, any novel written in imitation of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719–22) that deals with the problem of the castaway's survival on a desert island.
Related Topics: Novel
One of the best known robinsonades is Swiss Family Robinson (1812–27) by Johann Rudolf Wyss, in which a shipwrecked clergyman, his wife, and his four sons manage not only to survive on their island but also to discover the good life. Jules Verne strands his castaways in Mysterious Island (1874) with only one match, one grain of wheat, a metal dog collar, and two watches. From these beginnings they build up an impressive island industry. In the 20th century the flowering of science fiction produced a new type of robinsonade in which castaways struggle to survive in outer space or on distant planets.
This article was most recently revised and updated by J.E. Luebering, Executive Editorial Director.
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children's literature: Prehistory (early Middle Ages to 1712)
… engendered a whole school of "Robinsonnades" in most European countries, the most famous example being...…
Robinson Crusoe
…book immediately spurred imitations, called Robinsonades, and he himself used it as a springboard for...…
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Daniel Defoe, English novelist, pamphleteer, and journalist, author of Robinson Crusoe...…
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