A New Kind of Didactic Novel

A New Kind of Didactic Novel A New Kind of Didactic Novel A New Kind of Didactic Novel By Maeve Maddox Didactic fiction is nothing new. Aesops tales are didactic, as are Langlands The Vision of Piers Plowman, Bunyans The Pilgrims Progress, Hesses Siddhartha, and Orwells Animal Farm. The authors of all these works desired to teach readers a lesson about the moral significance of human behavior. The word didactic is from a Greek verb meaning both to teach and to learn. There was a time that authors could admit to wanting to create a didactic novel and critics were willing to praise such novels for their moral effectiveness. The success of Harriet Beecher Stowes didactic novel Uncle Toms Cabin (1852) illustrates the effectiveness of using fiction to promote an authors social ideals. Beginning in the 1700s, American abolitionists churned out thousands of tracts in their fight to abolish slavery in the United States. None of them produced the effect of the extended abolitionist tract that Mrs. Stowe framed as fiction. tract noun: a pamphlet, leaflet, or folder issued (as by a political or religious group) for propaganda. In the nineteenth century, Uncle Toms Cabin was the best-selling novel in the world. According to what may be an apocryphal anecdote, when Mrs. Stowe met Abraham Lincoln in 1862, he remarked, so you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war. Modern readers expect a textbook or how-to book to be didactic, but modern critics usually perceive didacticism in a work of creative fiction as a flaw: George Orwell was better at essays than at novels. His most famous novels,  1984  and  Animal Farm,  are clunkily didactic, especially  Animal Farm.   George refers to Dickens on the first page of her earnest but perhaps overly didactic novel, What Happened Before He Shot Her. OConnor has been criticized for being overly  didactic. Odetss inability to escape this 1930s pigeonhole is reflected in the intensely ideological, even didactic, nature of his plays.   Unlike many other Soviet filmmakers, whose works are boldly and aggressively didactic, Alexander Dovzhenkos cinematic output is personal and fervently private.   Now, however, a fictional genre called the startup novel has emerged, written by experienced and wanna-be entrepreneurs. These novels encapsulate blueprints for successful entrepreneurship in plots that employ action and intrigue. Apparently, entrepreneurs are reading them to learn the techniques of starting a business. Entrepreneur Orr Ben-Zvy says that after reading almost every [nonfiction] book on Amazons 50 best sellers for business and the next 50 for entrepreneurship, he discovered something counterintuitive: fiction [is] much more useful than nonfiction. His search for a fictionalized account of how to achieve financial success with a startup company led him to Eliot Pepers novel Uncommon Stock (2014), a book credited with being the first of its kind. According to a blurb on Amazon, the Uncommon trilogy has attracted a cult following in Silicon Valley and is the #1 top-rated financial thriller on Amazon. The genre that romanticizes and describes the process of starting a business has blossomed since 2014. An Amazon search for financial thrillers brings up pages and pages of titles. I havent read one yet, but I intend to. Im curious to see what kind of moral message this new didactic genre has for its readers. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Fiction Writing category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:45 Synonyms for â€Å"Food†Ten Yiddish Expressions You Should KnowCareful with Words Used as Noun and Verb