section_path: 18th-century novels/Philosophical novel
section_name: Philosophical novel
paragraph_text: Philosophical novel
  
  The rising status of the novel in eighteenth century can be seen in the development of philosophical and experimental novels.
  
  Philosophical fiction was not exactly new. Plato 's dialogues were embedded in fictional narratives and his Republic is an early example of a Utopia. Ibn Tufail 's 12th century Philosophus Autodidacticus with its story of a human outcast surviving on an island, and the 13th century response by Ibn al-Nafis, Theologus Autodidactus are both didactic narrative works that can be thought of as early examples of a philosophical and a theological novel, respectively.
  
  The tradition of works of fiction that were also philosophical texts continued with Thomas More 's Utopia (1516) and Tommaso Campanella 's City of the Sun (1602). However, the actual tradition of the philosophical novel came into being in the 1740s with new editions of More's work under the title Utopia: or the happy republic; a philosophical romance (1743). Voltaire wrote in this genre in Micromegas: a comic romance, which is a biting satire on philosophy, ignorance, and the self-conceit of mankind (1752, English 1753). His Zadig (1747) and Candide (1759) became central texts of the French Enlightenment and of the modern novel.
  
  An example of the experimental novel is Laurence Sterne 's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767), with its rejection of continuous narration. In it the author not only addresses readers in his preface but speaks directly to them in his fictional narrative. In addition to Sterne's narrative experiments, there are visual experiments, such as a marbled page, a black page to express sorrow, and a page of lines to show the plot lines of the book. The novel as a whole focuses on the problems of language, with constant regard to John Locke 's theories in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.