Module 3 Lesson 4 - Read

Read: Definition, History, and Types of Prose

Overview

Prose is a form of writing that takes the form of ordinary speech. Like speech, it can take on both informal and formal tones and is organized into accepted grammatical structures such as sentences and paragraphs.

Prose is written the way we think, generally prioritizing clarity and understanding over aesthetic appeal. Its form is easily adaptable to descriptive passages, factual discourse, spoken dialogue, and fictional writing. This makes it valuable for a wide range of written works, including history, literature, philosophy, law, reference works, media, and business communication.

History of Prose Literature

The term prose comes from the Latin phrase prosa oratio, meaning “straightforward or direct speech” (without the aesthetic concerns of poetry/verse). This evolved into the Old French prose, a “story narration,”  around 1300 CE. At that time, prose writing became synonymous with non-poetry. From its earliest practice, prose has been used for record keeping, explaining philosophical ideas, and recording historical facts and laws.

As a literary form, prose was often considered appropriate for lower forms of literature, particularly picaresque fiction dealing with the adventures of a rough and dishonest but appealing hero. Prose was also seen as appropriate for chivalric and romance novels. We see this in early prose fiction such as the Satyricon (Petronius Arbiter, 1st century CE) and The Golden Ass (Apuleius, 2nd century CE), and the prose romances of the Middle Ages, such as Le Morte D’Arthur. These prose romances were often retellings of heroic legends in terms of the romantic chivalry of the early Renaissance. When combined with barbaric, medieval, and Renaissance sensibility, they transformed the tales of Lancelot and Guinevere into something not unlike modern romance novels of tragic love.

These early prose works gave birth to more modern expressions of the novel, beginning in the 17th century with The Ingenious Nobleman Don Quixote de la Mancha, by the Spaniard Miguel de Cervantes. Don Quixote is considered the most influential work of literature from the Spanish literary canon and a founding work of modern Western literature. More importantly, it served to elevate prose fiction as a form of literature suitable for longer narratives.

With Don Quixote, the novel was nearing its modern form as a lengthy narrative, presented in chapters that are held together by a cohesive plot, literary character development, and theme.

The prose tradition continued to grow in the 17th and 18th centuries with foundational fictional narratives and essays. In France, we had important works of prose such as The Princess of Cleves (1678) by Madame de La Fayette and Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782) by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. The English novel of the 18th century is exemplified by Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.

Essays from this same period included Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia (1647) by Baltazar Gracián, A Modest Proposal (1729) by Jonathan Swift, An Essay on Man (1734) by Alexander Pope, and The Federalist Papers (1777-1778) by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay.

Prose entered a golden age in the 19th century, spurred by the energy of major literary, philosophical, and cultural movements such as romanticism, naturalism, and modernism. This was the century that witnessed novelistic works ranging from those of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Herman Melville to Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The 19th century also saw the emergence of the short story as a recognized, separate form of literary prose.

Types of Prose Literature

There are numerous genres and sub-genres of prose, but our focus is on the primary types of prose literature. In particular, we will concentrate on the novel, short story, and essay.

The novel is a long narrative that presents a fictional story of the human experience through a connected sequence of events, characters, and literary settings. Novels are typically published as books and encompass a broad array of types and styles including picaresque, epistolary (a novel written in the form of letters), Gothic, philosophical, realist, fantasy, and historical.

A short story is a brief fictional narrative, shorter than a novel, that can generally be read in a single sitting. Short stories feature concise plots and reduced casts of characters and focus on a central effect or mood. The short story dates back to oral storytelling and written forms such as anecdotes and parables. These developed into the written stories of the early 14th century — The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer and The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio — and evolved into our modern short story in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Essays are interpretive or critical compositions that present an author’s viewpoint related to a specific topic or event. Essays are usually much shorter and less systematic than book-length prose. Michel de Montaigne’s Les Essais (1580) contains over 100 examples widely regarded as the predecessor of the modern essay. The essay has played a significant role in the development of ideas in Western civilization, and notable practitioners include Baltazar Gracián, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, T. S. Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginia Woolf, and Edmund Wilson.

 

Expand: Elements of Prose Fiction 

Discover

The literature of prose fiction is characterized and identified by seven elements. The elements common to all prose fiction include: plot, character, setting, point of view, theme, style, and symbolism.

The Seven Elements of Prose

Plot: Plot refers to the particular sequence of events through which an author constructs a story. The plot is more than merely the action itself, and the author arranges and structures the action toward a specific end. The events can be related chronologically, or the story may begin with later incidents before going back to let the reader know how things reached that point. Conflict and suspense are important elements related to plot.

Character: Characterization involves creating or developing characters so they seem real. This is important in shaping readers’ attitudes toward individual characters and the story as a whole, but can be incredibly  complex given the nature of humans and their various interactions. Authors may choose to describe characters directly, or have them reveal themselves through dialogue and action. The main character in a work is called the protagonist, and if s/he is pitted against an important opponent, that character is called the antagonist.

Setting: Setting is the overall context in which a fictional narrative occurs. This context includes the time, place, physical surroundings, and social environment of a work. Setting is important because it is related to the purpose and meaning of a narrative. In some texts, it is so important that it becomes a primary character.

Point of View: Narrative point of view refers to who is telling a story and how it’s told. More specifically, it answers the question, “Through whose eyes am I seeing or learning about what’s happening?” The teller of the story, or narrator, may or may not be identifiable with the author, but inevitably affects our understanding of characters and events by filtering what is told through his or her closeness to the story and perspective. While more than one point of view may be used in a fictional narrative, the story is often told in either first or third person.

The first person narrator uses “I” and is somehow a participant in the actions being related. The reader is restricted to the observations, thoughts, and feelings of whatever the character is narrating. This also means that the first person narrator is naturally subjective and may not be entirely reliable. The third person narrator is not a character in the story and may be omniscient, having an unlimited knowledge of events and characters, or limited. The third person limited narrator generally relates events from the point of view of a single character, and is limited to that character’s perceptions and knowledge related to the actions of other characters.

Theme: The literary theme of a work is the central idea that binds together the elements of the story. The theme may be stated explicitly in a work, or communicated indirectly through the elements of the story themselves. Often, the theme of a narrative work can be stated in a single word, such as love, death, or greed.

Style: Literary style refers to the way an author uses the different elements of language to create a specific tone or effect in a work. Style is influenced by word choice, syntax, diction, and rhythm. An author’s style may contribute significantly to the meaning and inventiveness of a work.

Symbolism: This refers to objects, names, people, and settings that are assigned a certain meaning different from the original meaning. In Joseph Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness (1899), the author uses the literal darkness of the African continent to symbolize the lack of civilization and possible evil there. Writers use literary devices such as metaphor, allegory, and allusion to create symbolism in their works.

 

Module 3 Lesson 4 of 5