The English novel in the time of Shakespeare

The rise of the English novel needs rethinking after it has been confined to the "formal realism" of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Watt, 1957), to "antecedents, forerunners" (Schlauch, 1968; Klein, 1970) or to mere "prose fiction" (McKillop, 1951; Davis, Richetti, 1969; Fish, 1971; Salzman, 1985; Kroll, 1998). My paper updates a book by Jusserand under the same title (1890) by proving that the social and moral history of the long prose genre admits no strict separation of "novel" and "romance", as both concepts are intertwined in most fiction (Cuddon, Preston, 1999; Mayer, 2000). The rise of the novel, seen in its European context, mainly in France and Spain (Kirsch, 1986), and equally in England, was due to the melting of the nobility and high bourgeoisie into a "meritocracy", or to its failure, to become the new bearer of the national culture, around 1600. (Brink, 1998). My paper will concentrate on Euphues (1578), a negative romance, Euphues and His England (1580), a novel of manners, both by Lyly; Arcadia (1590-93) by Sidney, a political roman à clef in the disguise of a Greek pastoral romance; The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) by Nashe, the first English picaresque novel, and on Jack of Newbury (1596-97) by Deloney, the first English bourgeois novel. My analysis of the central values in these novels will prove a transition from the aristocratic cardinal virtues of WISDOM, JUSTICE, COURAGE, and HONOUR to the bourgeois values of CLEVERNESS, FAIR PLAY, INDUSTRY, and VIRGINITY. A similar change took place from the Christian virtues of LOVE, FAITH, HOPE to business values like SERVICE, TRUST, and OPTIMISM. Thus, the legacy of history proves that the main concepts of the novel of manners, of political romance, of picaresque and middle-class fiction were all developed in the time of Shakespeare.

Mining minimal non-redundant association rules using frequent closed itemsets

The problem of the relevance and the usefulness of extracted association rules is of primary importance because, in the majority of cases, real-life databases lead to several thousands association rules with high confidence and among which are many redundancies. Using the closure of the Galois connection, we define two new bases for association rules which union is a generating set for all valid association rules with support and confidence. These bases are characterized using frequent closed itemsets and their generators; they consist of the non-redundant exact and approximate association rules having minimal antecedents and maximal consequences, i.e. the most relevant association rules. Algorithms for extracting these bases are presented and results of experiments carried out on real-life databases show that the proposed bases are useful, and that their generation is not time consuming.