Novel of incident: a novel in which episodic action dominates, and plot and character are subordinate. The structure is loose, with an emphasis on the thrilling incident rather than on characterization or suspense. Restoration and eighteenth century. Examples: Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe: here, the shipwreck, the meeting with Friday, the clash with visiting natives, and other incidents follow each other chronologically, but they are more or less independent of one another.

Picaresque novel: a chronicle, usually autobiographical, presenting the life story of a rascal of low degree engaged in menial tasks and making his living more through his wits than his industry. The picaresque novel tends to be episodic and structureless. The picaro or central figure, through various pranks and predicaments and by his associations with people of varying degree, affords the author an opportunity for satire of the social classes. Romantic in the sense of being an adventure story, the picaresque novel nevertheless is strongly marked by realism in its petty detail and by uninhibited expression. Restoration and eighteenth century.

    Seven qualities distinguish the picaresque novel:

1. It chronicles a part or the whole of the rogue’s life in first-person narrative.
2. The chief figure is drawn from a low social level, is of loose character, and, if employed at all, does menial work.
3. The novel presents a series of episodes only slightly connected.
4. Progress and development of character do not take place.
5. The method is realistic. Though the story in itself may be romantic, it is presented with a plainness of language and a vividness of detail such as only the realist is permitted.
6. Thrown with people from every class and often from different parts of the world, the picaro serves them intimately in some lowly capacity and learns all their foibles and frailties. This type of novel may satirize social castes, national types, or racial peculiarities.
7. The hero usually stops just short of being an actual criminal.

    Examples: Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Cervantes’ Don Quixote.

Epistolary novel: a novel in which the narrative is carried forward by letters written by one or more of the characters. It gives the author an opportunity to present the characters’ feelings and reactions without the intrusion of the author; it gives a sense of immediacy, because the letters are usually written in the thick of the action. It enables the author to present multiple points of view on the same event. Eighteenth century. Examples: Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Richardson’s Clarissa, Tobias Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker, and Fanny Burney’s Evelina. This form was popular in the eighteenth century, particularly for the sentimental novel.

Sentimental novel: also referred to as a novel of sensibility; shows sentimentality and emotionalism. Eighteenth century. Examples: Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.

Gothic novel: a novel with magic, mystery, medieval castles with secret passageways and ghosts, other ruins, and/or an innocent victim hounded by a villain as its primary characteristics. Eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Examples: Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This form has exerted a powerful influence on other forms:  Coleridge’s "Kubla Khan",  Keats’s "The Eve of St. Agnes", Sir Walter Scott’s novels, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories.

Novel of manners: a novel dominated by social customs, manners, conventions, and habits of a definite social class in a given era. The mores of a specific group, described in detail and with great accuracy, become powerful controls over characters. This type of novel is often, although by no means always, satiric; it is always realistic. Late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Examples: Jane Austen’s novels.

Historical novel: a novel that reconstructs a past age, usually an age when two cultures are in conflict; fictional personages participate in actual events and move among actual personages. Other examples, such as The Scarlet Letter, will depart from the formula somewhat to make the setting and the age secondary to the representation of character. Romantic era. Examples: Sir Walter Scott’s novels and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.

Bildungsroman: a novel that recounts the youth and young adulthood of a sensitive protagonist who is attempting to learn the nature of the world, discover its meaning and pattern, and acquire a philosophy of life and "the art of living." Early to mid-nineteenth century. Example: Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations.

Problem novel: a narrative that derives its chief interest from working out some central problem; sometimes applied to novels written for a deliberate purpose.

Propaganda novel: a novel dealing with a special social, political, economic, or moral issue or problem and possibly advocating a doctrinaire solution. At times the propaganda purpose dominates the work so as to minimize all other elements, such as plot and character. Nineteenth century. Example: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Sociological novel: a form of the problem novel that concentrates on the nature, function, and effect of the society in which characters live. Usually this type of novel presents a thesis as a resolution to a social problem, but it is by no means always a propaganda novel. The serious examination of social issues grew important with the Industrial Revolution and these writers scrutinized the condition of laborers and their families. Nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Examples: Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and John Steinbeck’s novels.

Naturalistic novel: a novel that tends to emphasize either a biological or a socioeconomic determinism. The naturalist strives to be objective in the presentation of material; amoral in the view of the struggle in which human animals find themselves;  neither condemning nor praising human beings for actions beyond their control; pessimistic about human capabilities – life, the naturalists seem to feel, is a vicious trap. Naturalistic novels show the influence of Darwin, with their emphasis on organism, struggle, adaptation, fertility, crisis, and extinction. Late nineteenth and twentieth century. Examples: George Eliot’s novels, Thomas Hardy's novels,  Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage,  Jack London’s novels, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy.

Psychological novel: a novel that places unusual emphasis on interior characterization and on the motives, circumstances, and internal action that spring from and develop external action. The psychological novel, not content to state what happens, goes on to explain the why of this action. Characterization is more than usually important. Nineteenth and twentieth century. Examples: George Eliot’s novels, Thomas Hardy’s novels, Joseph Conrad’s novels, and Henry James’s novels.

Stream-of-consciousness novel: a novel taking as its subject matter the flow of the stream of consciousness of one or more of its characters. The stream-of-consciousness novel uses varied techniques to represent this consciousness. In general, most psychological novels report the flow of conscious and ordered intelligence, as in the work of Henry James, but the stream of consciousness novel tends to concentrate its attention chiefly on the nonverbalized level, within which the image must express the unarticulated response without the logic of grammar. Twentieth century.

    For the writer of this type of novel:

1. The significant existence of human beings is to be found in their mental-emotional processes and not in the outside world.
2. This mental-emotional life is disjointed and illogical.
3. A pattern of free psychological association rather than of logical relation determines the shifting sequence of thought and feeling.
4. The character’s thoughts appear through interior monologue, a technique recording the internal, emotional experiences of the character by reaching downward to the nonverbalized level where images must be used to represent sensations or emotions. Examples: Virginia Woolf’s novels, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and William Faulkner’s novels.