Forgive the intrusion, please. I need a word.

[jbor]

>> what is the literary
>> term for a novel that teaches people how to behave morally?

> Terrance at lycidas2 at earthlink.net wrote:

> Is this a trick question?

Perhaps. I'm tempted to say *moralische Wochenschriften*, but those aren't
novels. The actual term is probably propaganda novel or thesis novel:

    thesis novel. One which treats of a social, political, or religious
    problem with a didactic, and perhaps, radical, purpose. It certainly
    sets out to call people's attention to the shortcomings of a society.
    Examples include Charles Kingsley's _Alton Locke_ (1850), Harriet
    Beecher Stowe's _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ (1852), Dickens' _Hard Times_
    (1854), Charles Reade's _Hard Cash_ (1863), Samuel Butler's _The Way of
    All Flesh_ (1903), Upton Sinclair's _The Jungle_ (1906), Robert
    Tressell's _The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists_ (1914, 1955), Walter
    Greenwood's _Love on the Dole_ (1933), Winifred Holtby's _South Riding_
    (1936), Steinbeck's _The Grapes of Wrath_ (1939), and Alan Paton's
    _Cry, the Beloved Country_ (1948). Some would include William Golding's
    _Lord of the Flies_ (1954) in this category. Utopian and dystopian
    visions in fictional form might also be included.
                                                [J.A. Cuddon]

The common feature of these novels is that the moral or didactic message is
the primary purpose of the text's production and performance, and that this
message is plainly and simply presented in order that every reader will
"get" it.  

best



> A good question to ask your professor and respected  scholar Andrew
> Delbanco. 
> I believe he's written a book on the subject.
> Or James Wood. 
> Or maybe our very own MalignD (Nabokov's lectures).
> A word? Novels that instruct?
> Propaganda ;-)
> Try searching "Novel" AND  "Delight and Instruct", "Cause and Effect",
> "Aristotle and  Plot".
> If you're only looking for a word--didactic.
> However, I'm not sure that a book that teaches people to behave morally
> can also be a novel.
> This is probably just my own opinion or just my own confusion about what
> a novel is. 
> See also Didactic Literature, Allegory, Courtesy Book, Exemplum, Satire.
> 
> On the the other hand, there are explicitly didactic authors, ranging
> from allegorists like Bunyan to philosophical propagandists like Sartre.
> Satirists like Swift and Voltaire, though they may indulge in some
> realistic effects for their own sake, will clearly sacrifice realism
> whenever their satirical ends require the sacrifice. On the other hand,
> many purely "mimetic" or objective writers, writers for whom the
> allegation of didacticism would be distressing, also treat realism as
> subordinate and functional to their special purposes. Much as Fielding
> and Dickens, Trollope and Thackery may talk about their passion for
> truth to nature or the real, they are often willing, as some modern
> critics have complained, to sacrifice reality to tears or laughter.
> 
> Booth, Wayne *The Rhetoric of Fiction*
> 
> Pynchon's Progress?  ...quest novels... postmodern parodies of quest and
> detective
> novels... encyclopedic... carnival...picaresque....
> 
> "And Isaiah the prophet cried unto the LORD: and he brought the
> shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down in the
> dial of Ahaz." 
> - II Kings 20:11.