 Hello, welcome to the national program on technology enhanced learning NPTEL a joint venture by Indian institutes of technology and Indian institute of science. We are in the domain of literature, English language and literature and today we are going to start a new module on literary genres. I teach English at the department of humanities and social science at IIT Guwahati and it has been an experience all through the years teaching literature to engineering students and at the end of the day I find that it has become beautiful experience when we try to send the students to the beauties and the wonders of interpretation of a literary text. When we talk of genres as such we take it in the question of understanding the literary domain specific type of classification used for creative works of art, literature, music or other creative pursuits and this is usually characterized genre is usually characterized by a particular style by particular themes by form or content well. So, let us look into when this idea of the genre in literary studies had really come into the fore the earliest recorded systems of genre in western history can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle. Plato had only three imitational genres he based it on dramatic dialogue pure narrative epic which was a mixture of dialogue and narrative and lyric poetry was excluded by Plato as a non-mimetic mode. When we come to Aristotle we see that it was extended to again based on mimesis based on imitation on four types of classical genres which was tragedy which was given the highest form of expression literary expression superior dramatic dialogue then the epic then comedy and lastly parody as an inferior mixed narrative well. Now, when we really want to look at literatures and understanding literature and our approach to literature we look into the common definition of literature how it covers the major genres of poetry drama and novel and fiction well. Today we are going to cover mostly on the first most popular genre of literary expression novel and according to the modern critics or according to the scholars genres in literature have been more or less classified into this domains novel drama poetry autobiography short story essay and biography well. So, we come now to the novel where I think each one of us as students of literature or students of science or of engineering you must have that experience of being so involved in a novel or in a book that you could not literally put it down. So, what was it that was that grasped you or that involved you actually what we were engaged in if we really look into the whole process of reading it was basically a storytelling method a narrative art per se. If we go back into the etymological meaning of fact and fiction we will see that fact comes from latin facade to make or do and fiction comes from latin finger to make or shape this explains that a novel or a fictional narrative whether it is factual whether it is fictional in any medium is about the essentials of storytelling about narrating a tale or a story novel is per se about storytelling. Let us take note of all the different ways now in which one can define the novel is it about the story what grasped you is it about the characters is it about the plot that emphasizes the relationship between character and incident or is it mostly about the pattern and the rhythm that goes behind that story telling most importantly tree genre it is supposed to be and the most popular yes novels are not only products of writers imaginations, but can be any extended fictional narrative usually written in post we do have the poetic novel, but usually it is written in the post narrative Virginia Wolf described it as the most pliable of all forms you can experiment with its form there is no set rule that it should begin like this it should end like this while E. M. Foster defends the novel simply as a fiction in prose of a certain extent well therefore the novel is if we trace back to the etymology of the word novel now we had seen the word fact and fiction etymologically how it also intersanges, exchanges its own qualities, but the word novel which was not even used until the end of the 18th century the word came into actually came into being in the 18th century it is an English transliteration of the Italian word novel or novella and an anonymous writer has said that it is an extended fictional narrative usually written in prose while not a fry a scholar of a critic of a literature he has given the novel he had called the novel a low mimetic mode not as high as the drama or poetry well. So, now we come to what is a novel a novel is the same as the story, but it is longer and more complex it is just storytelling it is just narrating and the story always has so many components to it how it begins where it ends how does it reach to a climax what are the characters involved in it what is the conflict which is there what are the moral issues which are being shown how much of humor is there how much of irony is there. So, according to Percy Lou book one of the stalwarts of criticism on the novel he had said that it is an imaginary work in prose of a considerable length which presents as real certain characters living in a given environment and describes their attitudes faith and adventure. So, the very act of writing a novel offers what an objective viewpoint does not it of the world which is rooted in the subjectivity of its author. So, you are the author and you are talking about the objective world. So, this domain of the object and the subject is very much rooted being born at the same time as modern science the novel shares to its investigative spirit well when we are at the background of talking about the interpretation of text or interpretation of a genre or a genre we find that in understanding literature it is always better to be equipped with two modes of understanding a text the manner and the matter. So, the matter is the content and the manner is the technique. So, this are the ways that we always have to see how the story is being told the technique of the story and the content of the story. Yet the English novel from D4 to old was still a kind of romance even though we see that with modern science the novel shares its investigative spirit we find that if we look into trace the evolution of the novel as such from the 16th, 17th centuries we find that somewhere or other there are the elements of romance attached to it we cannot escape from that a kind of a pick of a prosaic modern world. And wherever we read whether we read Tolstoy's Warren Pease, Dr. Jivago Boris Bestenek all Russian novelist or Hemingway's old man and the sea coming closer home if we read so many other Salman Rushdie we have Vikram Seth we always find that there is somewhere that element of romance that element of mystique which has been added to sociological portraiture or to life as it has been told. Some do retain myth fable folk tale and romances well. So, let us now look into the long history of its evolution right. So, the Russian cultural theorist Michael Bakhtin traces the novel back to imperial Rome and ancient Hellenistic romance. I do believe because of its roots because of its origin this is where the mystique of the novel still persists it must have left fragments of it always in the presentation. However, experiments had gone on in the making of the novel this historical roots both in novel not only has goes back to imperial Rome and Hellenistic romances, but it has historical roots both in a field short compact broadly realistic medieval tales in early modern romances of Pocassio the Cameron and also by Anne the Heptameron a collection of tales of love composed by Mercury the Queen of Navar and others created as a form for preservation of oral literatures of various cultures it grew to include epics romances adventures like the Arthurian legion and knighthood. So, I think somewhere or the other when we look into this background it helps us to understand how the novel has evolved through the ages and how from the myths and fables to the romances it has gone into the modern novel of ours. Many currents have come together to produce the English novel because we are more or less concentrating on the English novel. Let us see what are the currents which had gone in the making of the English novel. The actual novel form actually developed through the memoir which we will be dealing with later in the form of autobiography and novel an epistolary novel of the 16th and 17th centuries to the novel of the omniscient third person narrator which has dominated from the late 18th century to the present time. The long history of the novel's evolution therefore, if we go back we see that it is the oral tales of myths and fables then things which were written storytelling in the form of the epic then written prose fiction concerned with adventure known as the romance. French word for the novel is roman then it comes down to the Elizabethan prose tales and my new Elizabethan age was the age of poetry it was called the nest of singing birds, but yet at that time we find that the Elizabethan prose tales took a form of its own and this again comes down to the written prose fiction concerned with reality or actual life and new in English is novel in the 17th. So, used in this modern sense the word novel appears in England in the mid 19th century when it was safely associated with the romances of illicit love before it did not somehow enter into the canon of English literature something which was sort of written by clandestine affairs and where it was preoccupation of the lazy aristocracy and the novel form developed through the memoir novel and epistolary novels and for this reason the word history was more often favored to describe the long prose fiction of the 18th century which were precursors of the modern novel. So, people were cherry of using the word novel which did not have somehow the enjoyed the high pedestal of the literary canon well let us now look who was the first novelist if we can term it in English literature or in world literature it could have been the Spanish serventist who wrote Don Quixote or the very English Daniel Defoe where really the novel became the dominant form of creative literature in the mid 18th century. If you go back to the 10th century many say that Sosa Joffrey Sosa was the father of English prose he is prologue to the cantibary tales it has all the qualities of the modern novel yet we do not term it as the modern novel per se. Daniel Defoe and his novel Robinson Crusoe in around 1719 and later Defoe's Malflenders actually set the structure and themes of the novel. So, this is in the 18th century that we find that a novel really comes into the forefront many currents come together to produce the English novel Elizabethan prose tales, picker stories, accounts of the urban underworld represented one. Now, when we have seen how this has gone into the making of the novel as such the character writers of the 17th century developed a technique of psychological portraiture which was available to Edison and Steele. Edison and Steele were prose writers they were assessed. So, you can see the shift which was going on from journalism to novel and from novel to journalism. So, the techniques of writing or the manner of writing or expression was somehow being reflected one on the other and even the narrative style used by Bunyan in the pilgrims progress and the somewhat similar factual style of Defoe's journalistic writing also helped to make the fully realized novel possible in the 18th century itself. So, we are here in the 18th century which was supposed to be the age of the novel as such. Samuel research in Pamela published in 1740 is noted by many literary critics to be the first major novel and Daniel Defoe's was the first novel as such or servant is Don Quixote, but as a mature novel with all the qualities with all its components of a novel many case it back to that to research in Pamela because it deals with the issues of social class as well as of love. Even Henry Fielding in 1742 Joseph Andrews who had the first well rounded characters and essential quality to the novel appeared. So, the rise of the novel in the 18th century this is a very important part and this was because of the what would you call it the reception by the public to the novel that it became popular in the later ages and we have to thank them that the 18th century received the novel as a form of literary expression. Therefore, the rise of the novel in the 18th century written by Defoe research in and Fielding was partly due to its milieu it was partly because of the readership and the people who had really welcomed the novel and particularly the changing social and economic shifts as a result of the industrial revolution. So, the shift novelist of the 18th century Defoe research in Fielding's Marlottes Lawrence turned so greatly and rapidly developed the form that by the early 19th century Jane Austen who dominated like Colossus in the 19th century could write in Nottinger A. B. Abbey one of our novels that in the novel the greatest powers of the mind are displayed. This is a form this is a genre which was the most suitable for all the powers of the mind. So, we come to the 19th century the 19th century was the great age of the English novel it was because of the rise of the middle class with its new leisure with its new modes of entertainment because they had money to spend they were literate they had new markets there was publishing firms, wealth, time etcetera partly because of the steady increase of the reading public with the growth of lending libraries the development of publishing in the modern sense and other things really developed during this time and the industrial revolution around 18th century to the middle of 19th century you find this were the causes which really accelerated the growth of the novel. The novel became the dominant form of creative literature in the mid 19th century if not earlier. So, the growth of cities urban population more reading public literary exchangers, literary interconnections to present a picture of life lived in a given society in different situation of social mobility, realism reporters psychological interventions everything that you have was here and therefore, it led to the proliferation of the novel. Rightly so with the creation of industry therefore, this new social and economic class of people the middle class could criticize the restrictive culture of industrial England in Jane Austen's first novel Sense and Sensibility which was a portraiture of that class as for a real picture of what daily life in industrial England was we have Charles Dickens with his huge collection all magnum opuses of his of his novels art times we have illustrates the appalling working conditions that factory workers face maybe the exception somewhere was Wadding Heights of Emily Bronte which is often regarded as an archetype of the tortured romantic hero which was not so much a reflection of the social you know industrial times, but more of the traumas of the romantic hero. Therefore, let us now look into the multiple genres and structural forms of this genre of the novel itself. If we look into John Steinbeck's coming to the 20th century we find in the early 20th century around the middle of the 20th century John Steinbeck, Nobel laureate John Steinbeck in his grapes of wrought you can call it a historical novel where he traces the journey of the oaky farmers who comes from the east to the west. Then the historical novel we have Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace which talks about the Napoleonic Wars the invasion to Russia a huge masterpiece and many people go back to it for reference. Then we have Ariya Maria remarked a German writers all quiet on the western front talks about the horrors of the first world war. Then the Bildungsroman novel Bildungsroman is something like a like a story of initiation where a character develops from the stage of initiation from the stage of understanding to the stage of maybe redemption or acknowledging his acknowledging what life is. So, Bildungsroman novel we have the adventures of Huckleberry Finn we have the adventures of Tom Sawyer Mark Twain's and which was supposed to be the primal source of all American literature which talks of freedom which talks of different aspects of the social variations. Then we do have another very well known novel by Harriet Beeser Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin which goes back into the tradition of the slave narratives in the Antebellum period that is in the American Civil War talks about a slave even though it is not written by a black I mean by a African American writer by a native. So, we find that it was one of the first almost a fiction which said let the world see what was the condition of America during the Antebellum period. The world of Jane Austen and P. G. Woodhouse if we look into here two different you know novelist many of you must have been reading P. G. Woodhouse in your school days a most popular novelist who writes in the vein of Jane Austen and his main tool is human not that he is a realistic writer as such, but then you have to see that he takes it as the ancient lineas of comedy and when we look into their novels whether of Jane Austen's Pride and Precise Sense and Sensibility and P. G. Woodhouse's Bertie Ooster series Gives series then we find that there is a there is a intended reflection of what they want to show. Yet both these writers have succeeded in transforming them into versatile timeless comedies. You can even put them into popular culture because they are so popular the age variations of the readerships may come from 10 years to a 70 year old man. So, Jane Austen's marvelous superb comic effects of selected incidents her characterization and her selfs of wit act like a late motive it goes on repeating on Woodhouse who is specially concerned with the significance of incidents rather than the incidents themselves. So, what did Jane Austen do she was to apply the techniques of the novel to the acute observation of society in microcosm tree that this is what she says three or four families in a country village was the little bit of ivory on which I work. So, finer brush as produces little effect after much labor she wrote in a letters. So, it was the minute of life that she had portrayed it was in the very very close reading of the suburban society that she was used to. She was to apply the microscope to human character and motivation with no great detective moral or satirical purpose as representation of universal patterns of behavior well. And continuing this comic tradition we find Peezy Woodhouse 1881 to 1975 one of the greats of modern fiction as one of the most popular novelist of the 20th century. He it was who had revolutionized the modern comic novel during his 75 year career. He showed what did he create when you go into the world of Peezy Woodhouse it is absolutely a different world altogether. It is a world of bumbling aristocrats masterful servants where the servants have the better they are better off than the masters strong young women and eminent loony doctors. Besides introducing characters set in the typical English countryside what did he do? He depicted a behavior of a class of people it was a gentle satire if not a satire at all working on the vanity triviality and misunderstanding of endless social rounds. For him the comic was generally a matter of a three corner relation the agent the victim and the reader well. So, when we come to again another form genre of the genre of novel that is the Piccarus novel. The Piccarus novel where the Piccaro Spanish word Piccaro means counter and the main character is a very likable scoundrel or a rascal like we have in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones. Then we have the trilogy novels where it goes into different sections the novel or novela then the science fiction we have mysteries like murder on the Orient Express. We have fantasy like many of you are familiar with that Harry Potter series and romances like Dr. Jivago and magic realism in novelist like Salman Rushdie Midnight Children and some of the Latin American writers. Therefore, we have seen the comic realm has been also intruded the tragic the social the realistic and it is somewhere that the genres have overlapped in this genre of the novel. So, Aristotle would have been shocked he had only put it into three he had only divided it into four categories. So, history realism romance and fantasy between extreme of history and fantasy on such a scale we might locate two major points of reference something like this. If we read Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea a classic a modern classic written in 1951 Moby Dick by Herman Melville the greats of the American literature. Heist's adventure Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien Lord of the Flies by William Golding and Gabrielle Garcia Marquess 100 years of solitude more or less magic realism which he had mingled realistic and fantastic details. So, we have seen that form and content now design and representation reconciling narrative as a whole conversing on style. The clarity of an Austin we have seen Jane Austin where she portrays the minute day of life as if it is realistic you live live in the realistic level to the modernist opposite of a joys when James Joyce and Virginia Woolf wrote the stream of consciousness method novels. It was based on the variation of the consciousness level of a person. So, you can call it transparent at the same time opaque and at the same time you would find that those were studies of psychological interpretation. In his classic study of the novel the great tradition the critic F. R. Levis defines a truly great novel in two chief ways. So, Levis says points it out as such. It must display what he calls number one a reverent openness before life and it must reveal an organic form. So, it must have a structure. You are students of engineering disciplines you might be surprised to see that literature too has a structure. Literature too has its organic form and any genre that we are studying it has its own grammar it has its own hierarchy of structures and in doing in knowing about this it helps us to appreciate the text better probably and probably our approach to literature or to the different genres of literature becomes a bit different and it becomes more appreciative or it becomes more rewarding. The trouble is that these two requirements were not easily compatible with each other. If you look into the reverent openness before life that you have to be open to life at the same time you have to look into the organic form. So, rather they would only be truly compatible if life itself were to reveal an organic form. So, however much F. R. Levis had said about this being novel having an organic form you might see that in the modern novel there have been many many variations many many experiments with form and sometimes you do not have a form at all. Sometimes you do not have a technique at all and the technique to develop that technique as Hemingway had said that it was the most difficult aspect of literary expression to write simply was the most difficult thing to do and to write a simple sentence he said which was true to life was the most difficult thing for a novelist to do. Now, let us look at what makes the structure of a note going back to F. R. Levis notwithstanding we might see for the sake of may be seeing the structure of a novel as such we might see as ordinary readers not as a critic because we will come into that critical theorization of text interpretation of text, but here as a simple reader of a novel we might see six elements used by authors. So, the most important elements of a novel is plot. What is plot? It is usually a trial of arrangement of the story going through initiation then conflict leading to a climax or denouement just like in drama it has that you have the opening first the characters are introduced or the setting is introduced or the story is introduced that is the first part then the second part is the where the conflict goes on where the entire story is being told and then it leads to the third part which is the denouement. Sometimes there are parallels of the story within the story which are the subplots we will find this likeness also in drama in the genre of drama. Then comes the theme which is the central idea which runs through the novel may be a moral to the story which gives the narration focus unity impact and a point. Then comes the setting of time whether it is day night the seasons the historical period it is 19th century modern period or the 20th century specific town locale country physical space real or fictional this includes mood or an atmosphere too like the Atlantic ocean in Mobidic Melville's Mobidic. Then we have characterization characterization is one important factor in a novel and where there may be sub characters there may be flat characters there may be dominant characters round characters and the symbols which I use a dominant symbol which is used a metaphor that has been used may be opening of windows it can be right or sometimes it may be a river which goes on coming as a late motive or sometimes it may be a sound it may be a piece of music it may be a fragrance. So, this is the symbol which is used different ways that techniques are being used and last not the least the language the language is one which really marks the novelist and it was Hemingway who had got the Nobel Prize he received the Nobel Prize for modern narration it was not so much for the content, but the way a novel has to be novel or story could be narrated and you find that the language is the tool for novelist right and it is true irony the way they use sentences the way they use methods like in Thomas Hardy's far from the Madding crowd which is the irony starts from the title itself irony is something which is just the opposite of what you intend to say it is a figure of speech based on difference it is a rhetorical device. So, all these rhetorical devices which are used by the novelist to express his story. Now, E. M. Forster like Luboc takes on seven elements we had discussed six elements, but he had said that there were seven elements vital to a novel in his aspects of the novel which is a landmark in literary criticism he says number one is the story then the people like the character then the plot then fantasy fantasy is a wonder is something which adds to it then a prophecy which anticipates what is going to come then the pattern which moves it is almost like the structure and also the rhythm which follows in a novel like in music when you listen to music you find that there is a particular rhythm is it fast or is it flat right and when you find that it is at even pace or even if it goes slow somewhere the impression of the novelist or the story gets diluted he not only defines Forster he was the first who had spoken about such terms as round versus flat characters right and why both are needed for an effective novel, but also provides examples of writing from such literary greats as Dickens and Boston when Percy Luboc however in his The Craft of Fiction which was published around 1966 he insist upon the point of view he talks that it is not so much the storytelling it is not so much the narrative structure of course all these are implied, but it is the point of view and much about the virtue of showing rather than telling. So, how you have to show rather than tell it is almost like the what Aristotle had made a difference between mimesis and digestus mimesis is imitation and digestus is narration right. So, novel is almost like a visual portrayal right and therefore he has to show rather than tell a story a story can be told as he said in many different ways this is from his work the art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of the story as a matter to be shown to be so exhibited that it will tell itself to hand over the reader the facts of the story merely as so much information this is no more than to state the argument of the book the book is not a row of facts I quote it is a single image the facts have no validity in themselves it is not the simple art of narrative, but the comprehensive art of fiction that I am considering and in fiction there can be no appeal to any authority outside the book itself these are famous lines of Lubach when he had concentrated on the points of view whether it is from the first person or from the second person or from the third person 20th century literary theory if we look into it now I had referred to the critics opinion of a novel or critics interpretation of a text when we look at a criticism as such we will be dealing with it in the different modules of this domain and we will see that the subject matter of literary criticism is an art and criticism is evidently something of an art too just like the creator the creative artist the novelist or the poet or the dramatist one who looks into the creative art or the creative piece his occupation is also that of an artist itself every art however needs its own critical organization and we post the novel as a question since it has been the center of all critical discourse and always we find that it is the novel which has been taken as an important medium for critical discourse whether it is formalism whether it is structuralism whether it is narratology deconstruction of Derrida where you completely see the text from binary objects psychoanalysis from psychology Marxism from sociology and history gender and sexuality post-colonialism text from the post-colonial angle reader response theory cultural studies everywhere that we see this are the directions in which we look into a text. So, when we look in suppose a old man under seeing if you look into it from the post-colonial narrative or if you look interpret the text from the Marxist angle or from cultural studies it will have different interpretation of the text it will have different you can say ideas of what the author meant to say may be the author never meant to say what he meant to say when this interpretation comes in right. So, let me give you an example from how B. S. Nipole's half a life noble laureate B. S. Nipole how his novel half a life can be seen from the post-colonial perspective from the post-colonial critical theory. I am not going into the integrities of the critical theories as such, but just giving you an idea that in Nipole's half a life has been hailed as one of the most incisive analysis of the post-colonial paradox to analyze the disintegrating networks of the unencouraged soul one who becomes almost rootless he does not know where he belongs stored in memory in multiple layers with the psychotherapy other which is used as a refuse to interpret the journey through the trans-cultural world where he belongs to so many worlds, but he does not know where his actual homeland is. The failed coda in Nipole's world thus becomes a disengaged experience of the expert right with the scripting sense of dislocation and displacement. Well when we look into Nipole's half a life we are looking into reading the text not only from the post-colonial angle we are looking into the language that is being written. The language also has a different vocabulary it has a different way of giving the masses. Well another angle if we look into Noble Laureth Patrick White Australian novelist one of the most powerful novelist of the 20th century especially in his tree of man where he employs so many of the forms of narrative which are also prevalent in the other side of the world may be from Buddhism from mandalic consciousness from psychological interpretation of the self apart from the course colonial disengagement with his roots. So, it was to overcome the exaltation of the average that Patrick White had conceived the tree of man which was an attempt to portray every possible aspect of life to the lives of an ordinary man and woman and at the same time to discover the extraordinary behind the ordinary. So, you find that this is almost what Jane Austen had tried to do she had looked into the ordinary man and woman and she said and even as D. H. Lawrence one of the most eminent modern novelist of the 20th century British novelist he had said you take two families and when you enact the story out of these two families you get the novel. Same way we find in the tree of man Patrick White he brings in the story of an ordinary man and woman and makes it almost like a universal tale of love suffering everything else. And it is the story of a pioneering farmer Stan Parker who comes and settles on a small isolated part of a virgin wilderness near Sydney in course of time he marries he has children the theme therefore, is in a sense nothing but the assertion of the indomitable will to strike roots despite formidable odds of the same life endlessly. So, we have two sides of the same coin we have Nipole here in half a life the unanchored soul here we have one who is trying to find anchor in in the in in his surroundings well specially important and specially beautiful are the openings of novels. We do remember the openings the beginnings of poems the beginnings of a drama like in Hamlet it started with an interrogation in Shakespeare Hamlet why or who. Same way in novels they have become epigrams by themselves the first lines of some popular novels have become epigrams happy families are all alike this is from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina 19th century happy families are all alike every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way somehow it is the first line which almost sums up what the entire novel is going to be then we have from Charles Dickens a tale of two cities again in the 19th century this is a very very well known beginning it was the best of times it was the worst of times it was the age of wisdom it was the age of foolishness it was the epoch of belief it was the epoch of incredulity it was the season of light it was the season of darkness it was the spring of hope it was the winter of despair. So, where is this division between poetry and novel you find the beginning itself poetic and it has been almost it tells about what is going to come this famous beginning from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice 19th century it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife and definitely the more years Rebecca last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again from Virginia Woolf's first famous opening in Mrs. Dalloway that is a novel in 1925 Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself simple opening a statement that is being given all right and it is almost the way that the stream of consciousness method develops after that how her mind works then we have Hemingway one of the great moderns American writer in farewell to arms he writes in the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains you just note the simplicity of his narrative over here as I had said earlier Hemingway was he worked upon how to write simply on modern narrative and it was the theory of implication it was like the iceberg theory where a word has to imply it does not have to tell everything. So, the theory of implication will be embedded into the narrative. So, the words will become symbols of implications so it is not that everything has to be told in great detail this was again from the old man and the sea he was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf stream and he had gone 84 days now without taking a fish note the number in 8 for 84 days right. So, these are all techniques of numbering techniques of narration which brings in space length and whatever magnitude of the problem discussed. So, if novel is the modern epic as it is in George Lucas's famous phrase the epic of a world abundant by God it must strive for sense and unity in an age when things no longer seem to harbor any inherent meaning or value the novel is a sign of a freedom. Yet the very act of writing a novel offers an alternative to this condition since a novel's objective vision of the world is one rooted in the subjectivity of the author right. So, discussion let us come to it when we ask questions on the novel form what mean ideas, themes does the author explore very very common questions that you can answer by yourself. Find one specific idea event of behavior in the book any book that you take that relates to real life, explain the relationship you see. Does the plot have unity are all the episodes relevant to the total meaning or effect of the story does this incident grow logically out of the preceding incident is each character developed enough to justify his role in the story. Does the theme reinforce or oppose popular notions of life. So, all the other notions of life which comes into it what point of view does the story use is it consistent in the use of this point of view if shifts are made are they justified. So, we come to the end of our lecture on novel and the text that were used here was on literature criticism and theory, David Deiser's a critical history of English literature, E. M. Foster's aspect of the novel, Lubox the craft of fiction, Eglton's the English novel and the concise Oxford companion to English literature Margaret Rebels and Robert souls elements of literature. Thank you.