ABSTRACT:
The novel rises in the context of growing secularization that classic modernity favours. As the genre of a 'God-forsaken world' (Lukács, 1920), it finds its home in the transcendental homelessness of the new world and resorts to irony, as a figure of speech and of thought. Identity shifts should be expected, and they do occur. Between the great epic and entertainment literature, if evolves in the low mode (Frye, 1957) introduced by the Gospel narratives that have been allotted pride of place among pre-novelistic writings. Bible reading protocols along the centuries, Bunyan's puritanic rewriting of the scriptural text, and prayer book supplements of the revealed word of God had secured continuity of imagery, expression and vision. There for the taking, the 'secular scripture' (Frye, 1976) that the novel is offers the modern reader a demotically fulfilled text - at once food for thought and for pleasure, the modern fulfillment of the classic 'utile dulci'. Its meliorism is the modern accomplishment of a solid Christian philosophy resounding in the Augustinian echo 'bona… dona'. The eighteenth-century philosophes had 'dismantled heaven somewhat prematurely [only] to retain their faith in the immortality of the soul (…) and the perfectibility of the human race' (Becker, 1932). The set pattern of the happy-ending novel confirms a fashion that will percolate in pathos-geared Victorian fiction.
This paper will tackle the way in which the pattern inherited from this 'well built' novel still gratifies our expectations and is welcome in our daily experience of the aesthetic.
