Novel

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.
Contents [hide]
1 Definition
1.1 A fictional narrative
1.2 Distinct literary prose
1.3 Media requirements: Paper and print
1.4 Special content: The novel's intricate intimacy
1.5 Length and the epic depiction of life
2 History
2.1 Etymology
2.2 The novel in other cultures
2.3 Antecedents of the European Novel
2.4 The medieval romance and its shorter rivals
2.4.1 Romances, 1000–1500
2.4.2 The tradition of the novella, 1200–1600
2.5 Before literature: The early market of printed books, 1470–1720
2.5.1 Trivializations: Chapbooks, 1470–1800
2.5.2 Heroic romances of style and fashion, 1530–1720
2.5.3 Satirical romances, 1500–1780
2.5.4 "Petites histoires" or "novels", 1600–1740
2.5.5 Dubious and scandalous histories, 1660–1720
2.6 From dubious history to literature: The 18th-century market reform
2.6.1 The rise of the novel
2.6.1.1 Cultural status and place
2.6.1.2 Realism and art
2.6.1.3 The words "novel" and "romance"
2.6.2 Legitimating the novel: World classics, 1670–1830
2.6.3 "The reformation of manners", 1678–1790
2.6.4 Fiction as a new experimental field, 1700–1800
2.6.5 The novel as national literature, 19th-century developments
2.6.6 Pushing art to its limits: Romanticism, 1770–1850
2.6.7 "Realism" and the reevaluation of the past and the present, 1790–1900
2.6.8 Explorations of the self and the modern individual, 1790–1930
2.7 The novel and the global market of texts: 20th- and 21st-century developments
2.7.1 Writing literary theory
2.7.2 Writing world history
2.7.3 Writing for the market of popular fiction
3 See also
3.1 Genres of the novel
3.2 Literature
3.3 Novels-related articles
4 Notes
5 Further reading
5.1 Contemporary views
5.2 Secondary literature
[edit]Definition

Gerard ter Borch, young man reading a book c.1680, the format is that of a French period novel.

Madame de Pompadour spending her afternoon with a book, 1756 – religious and scientific reading has a different iconography.
The fictional narrative, the novel's distinct "literary" prose, specific media requirements (the use of paper and print), a characteristic subject matter that creates intimacy, and length can be seen as features that developed with the Western (and modern) market of fiction. The separation of the field of literary fiction from the field of historical narrative fueled the evolution of these features in the last 400 years.
[edit]A 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 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 à clef and 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 personal narrative, 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.
[edit]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 histo