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Novel
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Novel (disambiguation).

Novels displayed in a German bookshop in February 2009.

A novel is a long prose narrative that describes fictional characters and events in the form of a sequential story, usually. The genre has historical roots in the fields of medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter, an Italian word used to describe short stories, supplied the present generic English term in the 18th century. Further definition of the genre is historically difficult. The construction of the narrative, the plot, the relation to reality, the characterization, and the use of language are usually discussed to show a novel's artistic merits. Most of these requirements were introduced to literary prose in the 16th and 17th centuries, in order to give fiction a justification outside the field of factual history.

Definition
fictional narrative
Fictionality is the feature most commonly invoked to distinguish novels from histories. From a historical perspective it can be a problematic criterion. Authors of histories in narrative form throughout the early modern period would often include inventions that were rooted in traditional beliefs or that would embellish a passage or add credibility to an opinion. Historians would thus invent and compose speeches for didactic purposes. Novels can, on the other hand, depict the social, political, and personal realities of a place and period with a clarity and detail historians would not dare to explore. The line between history and novel can be defined in aesthetic terms: Novels are supposed to show qualities

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of literature and art. Histories are by contrast supposed to be written in order to fuel a public debate over historical responsibilities. A novel can hence deal with history. It will be analyzed, however, with a look at the almost timeless value it is supposed to show in the hands of private readers as a work of art. Literary value is a source of constant argument: Does the specific novel possess the "eternal qualities" of art, the "deeper meaning" revealed by critical interpretation? The debate itself has allowed critics to develop the investigation and meaning of texts marked as 'fiction'. The novel differentiated itself from the historical category of forgery by announcing in its form the design of the author. The word novel can appear on book covers and title pages; the artistic effort or suspense is prefigured for the reader in a preface or blurb. Once it is stated that this is a text whose craftsmanship we should acknowledge literary critics will be responsible for the further discussion. At its beginnings, this new responsibility (historians were the only qualified critics up to the 1750s) made it possible to publicly disqualify much of the previous fictional production: Both the early-18th-century roman clefand its fashionable counterpart, the nouvelle historique, had offered narratives with by and large scandalous historical implications. Historians had discussed them with a look at facts they had related. The modern literary critic who became responsible for fictions in the 1750s offered a less scandalous debate: A work is "literature", art, if it has a personalnarrative, heroes to identify with, fictional inventions, style and suspense in short anything that might be handled with the rather personal ventures of creativity and artistic freedom. It may relate facts with scandalous accuracy, or distort them; yet one can ignore any such work as worthless if it does not try to be an achievement in the new field of literary works[1] it has to compete with works of art and invention, not with true histories. Historians reacted and left much of their own previous "medieval" and "early modern" production to the evaluation of literary critics. New histories discussed public perceptions of the past the decision that turned them into the perfect platform on which one can question historical liabilities in the West. Fictions, allegedly an essentially personal subject matter, became, on the other hand, a field of materials that call for a public interpretation: they became a field of cultural significance to be explored with a critical and (in the school system) didactic interest in the subjective perceptions both of artists and their readers.

Distinct literary prose

The first "romances" had been verse epics in the Romance language of southern France. Novel(la)s as those Geoffrey Chaucer presented in his The Canterbury Tales appeared in verse much later. A number of famous 19th-century fictional narratives such as Lord Byron's Don Juan (1824) and Alexander Pushkin's Yevgeniy Onegin (1833) competed with the moderne prose novels of their time and employed verse. It is hence problematic to call prose a decisive criterion.[2] Prose did, however, become the standard of the modern novel thanks to a number of advantages it had over verse once the question of the carrier medium was solved. Prose is easier to translate. As rather intimate and informal language prose won the market of European fiction in the 15th century, a time at which books first became widely available, and immediately developed a special style with models both in Greek and Roman histories and the traditions of verse narratives wherever an elevated style was

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needed. The development of a distinct fictional language was crucial for the genre that didn't aim at forging history but at works readers would actually identify and appreciate as fictions. This is for the early modern period closely connected to the development of elegance in the belles lettres. With the beginning of the 16th century the printed market had created a special demand for books that were neither simply published for the non academic audience nor explicitly scientific literature but. The belles lettres became this field as a compound of genres including modern history and science in the vernaculars, personal memoirs, present political scandal, fiction and poetry. Prose fiction was in this wider spectrum soon the driving force creating the distinct style as it allowed the artistic experiment and the personal touch of the author who could market his or her style as a fashion. Verse, rhetoric and science were by contrast highly restricted areas. Fictional prose remained close to everyday language, to the private letter, to the art of "gallant" conversation, to the personal memoir and travelogue.[3] 18th-century authors eventually criticized the France ideals of elegance the belles lettres had promoted. A less aristocratic style of English reformed novels became the ideal in the 1740s. The requirements of style changed again in the 1760s when prose fiction became part of the newly formed literary production. The more normal it became to open novels with a simple statement of their fictionality (for example by labelling them as "a novel"), the less interesting it became to imitate true histories with an additional touch of style. Novels of the 1760s such as Sterne's Tristram Shandy began to explore prose fiction as an experimental field. Novels of the ensuing romantic period played with the fragment and open-endedness. Modern late-19th-century and early-20th-century fiction continued the deconstruction attacking the clear author-reader communication and developing models of texts to be evaluated as such. Modern literary criticism acted in the experimental field as a constant provider of historical models. Authors who write fiction gain critical attention as soon as they search a position in future histories of literature, whether as innovators or traditionalists. The situation is in a historical perspective new: An awareness of traditions has only grown after the publication of Huet's Treatise on the Origin of Romances (1670). It has reached the public only with greater impact since the 1830s.

History
Etymology
The present English (and Spanish) word derives from the Italian novella for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the Latin novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of novellus, diminutive of novus, meaning "new".[10] Most European languages have preserved the term "romance" (as in French, Russian, Croatian, Romanian, Swedish and Norwegian "roman"; German "Roman"; Portuguese "romance" and Italian "romanzo") for extended narratives.

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