ABSTRACT
One may divide the development of the Western narrative literature into several different stages, using several different names for each of them; the epic covers more or less the whole body of oral narrative and the period up to the time the romance started to absorb entertaining stories of marvellous heroic exploits into prose form. The novel began to emerge in the 18th century when people felt weary of the narrative tradition which was becoming too idealistic and too removed from the reality of daily life. The romance itself in its origin expressed a wish to accommodate the demands of ordinary people and the ordinary world and to break away from the unrealistic pose of the epic when it had moved to the lofty world of poetry and the dreamland of heroic past. When poetry and prose went their separate ways and the epic went further into the mythic world of gods and demi-gods, the romance took the direction of the human world of legends and fairy tales and adopted the clothes of daily prose language. The road from the epic to the romance was a steady descent from the heavens and the top of Mount Olympus to the fairy land of palaces, a steady descent from gods to heroic kings and chivalrous generals. The descending movement of this narrative tradition took a step further down into the world of human beings, ordinary human beings, when the novel came into being in the 18th century in the hands of Fielding, Richardson and Defoe. The fall from gods to kings and then to prostitutes, foundlings and shipwrecked sailors was long and steep.
