The novel is one of the relatively new and developing modern genres of fiction. In world literature, it appeared long after genres such as drama and epic. Uzbek novels also have a century-long history of development

The Novel in France: 1600-1740

• That the early histories of the novel in Spain, France, and England are largely independent phenomena is exemplified by the failure of Don Quixote de la Mancha to attract a wide readership in England and France for many decades. In England, Don Quixote de la Mancha was “discovered” in the eighteenth century and became an influential work. The most successful French writers of the period from 1600 to 1740, working in a very different fictional tradition in a very different social and philosophical climate, were not at all influenced by this book, though Cervantes and the other picaresque writers did have disciples among the few French satirists and realists of the age.
• Aspects of the chivalric romances, particularly their aristocratic heroes and exotic settings, held the French imagination during much of this period. French writers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries modified the tradition in two important ways, however.

• One of the most popular works of this period, indeed throughout the seventeenth century, was Honoré d’Urfé’s L’Astrée (1607-1628; Astrea, 1657-1658), its five volumes exploring countless varieties of love conflict and presenting for each a series of Platonic speeches by the impeccably mannered lovers. Set in the fifth century in a society of shepherds and nymphs, the novel is a thinly veiled portrait of an idealized seventeenth century French aristocracy. So popular was d’Urfé’s work that members of the court, and many other aristocratic and bourgeois readers as well, strove to emulate the language and sentiments of Celadon, Astrea, and the many other characters. The course of the novel in France for the next fifty years was set by Astrea, as the Marquise de Rambouillet and the other members of literary high society cultivated imitators of d’Urfé.
• If the French novel can be said to have developed in this period, it did so by gradually abandoning the pastoral idyll and returning to the more martial heroism of the chivalric tradition. The best-known exemplar of this shift is Madeleine de Scudéry, herself the leader of a literary salon and the author of Artamène: Ou, Le Grand Cyrus (1649-1653; Artamenes: Or, The Grand Cyrus, 1653-1655) and Clélie (1654-1660; Clelia, 1656-1661). 

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