Portal:Novels

The Novels Portal

Title page of the 1628 edition of Bacon's New Atlantis

Madame de Pompadour spending her afternoon with a book (François Boucher, 1756)

A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction usually written in prose and published as a book. The 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'. According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, Medieval chivalric romance, and the tradition of the Italian Renaissance novella. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, in the historical romances of Walter Scott and the Gothic novel. Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, and John Cowper Powys, preferred the term romance. Such romances should not be confused with the genre fiction romance novel, which focuses on romantic love. M. H. Abrams and Walter Scott have argued that a novel is a fiction narrative that displays a realistic depiction of the state of a society, like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. The romance, on the other hand, encompasses any fictitious narrative that emphasizes marvellous or uncommon incidents. In reality, such works are nevertheless also commonly called novels, including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

The spread of printed books in China led to the appearance of the vernacular classic Chinese novels during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), and Qing dynasty (1616–1911). An early example from Europe was Hayy ibn Yaqdhan by the Sufi writer Ibn Tufayl in Muslim Spain. Later developments occurred after the invention of the printing press. Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote (the first part of which was published in 1605), is frequently cited as the first significant European novelist of the modern era. Literary historian Ian Watt, in The Rise of the Novel (1957), argued that the modern novel was born in the early 18th century with Robinson Crusoe.

Recent technological developments have led to many novels also being published in non-print media: this includes audio books, web novels, and ebooks. Another non-traditional fiction format can be found in graphic novels. While these comic book versions of works of fiction have their origins in the 19th century, they have only become popular recently. (Full article...)

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The Historian is the 2005 debut novel of American author Elizabeth Kostova. The plot blends the history and folklore of Vlad the Impaler (pictured) and his fictional equivalent Count Dracula. Kostova's father told her stories about Dracula when she was a child, and later in life she was inspired to turn the experience into a novel. She worked on the book for ten years and then sold it within a few months to Little, Brown, and Company, which bought it for a remarkable US$2 million. The Historian has been described as a combination of genres, including Gothic novel, adventure novel, detective fiction, travelogue, postmodern historical novel, epistolary epic, and historical thriller. It is concerned with history's role in society and representation in books, as well as the nature of good and evil. The evils brought about by religious conflict are a particular theme, and the novel explores the relationship between the Christian West and the Islamic East. Little, Brown, and Company heavily promoted the book and it became the first debut novel to become number one on The New York Times bestseller list in its first week on sale. As of 2005, it was the fastest-selling hardback debut novel in US history. Kostova received the 2006 Book Sense award for Best Adult Fiction and the 2005 Quill Award for Debut Author of the Year. Sony has bought the film rights and, as of 2007, were planning an adaptation.

Selected novel quote

‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Wendy Moira Angela Darling,’ she replied with some satisfaction. ‘What is your name?’
‘Peter Pan.’
She was already sure that he must be Peter, but it did seem a comparatively short name.
‘Is that all?’
‘Yes,’ he said rather sharply. He felt for the first time that it was a shortish name.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Wendy Moira Angela.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Peter gulped.
She asked where he lived.
‘Second to the right,’ said Peter, ‘and then straight on till morning.’
‘What a funny address!’
Peter had a sinking feeling. For the first time he felt that perhaps it was a funny address.
“A moment after the fairy’s entrance the window was blow open by the breathing of the little stars, and Peter dropped in.”

Peter Pan

Did you know...

Ernest Hemingway as photographed for 1940 edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls

...that Edgar Allan Poe satirized the concept of a self-made man in his story "The Business Man" using a character that makes his fortune cutting the tails off cats?
...that a description of the Battle of Aspern-Essling written by Patrick Rambaud as The Battle was originally a project of Honoré de Balzac?
...that the Iceberg Theory refers to Ernest Hemingway's (pictured) distinctive writing style?

General images

The following are images from various novel-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1Novelization of chapter 8 of the film series Les Vampires (1915–16) (from Novelization)
Image 2J. K. Rowling, 2010 (from Novel)
Image 3King Kong (1932) novelization of King Kong (1933). The novel was based on the screenplay and was marketing for the film which was released two months later. (from Novelization)
Image 41915 novelization of the original 1904 play Peter and Wendy (from Novelization)
Image 5Madame de Pompadour spending her afternoon with a book (François Boucher, 1756) (from Novel)
Image 6"Oh Edward! How can you?", a late-19th-century illustration from Sense and Sensibility (1811) by Jane Austen, a pioneer of the genre (from Romance novel)
Image 7Chaucer reciting Troilus and Criseyde: early-15th-century manuscript of the work at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (from Novel)
Image 8Richard Head, The English Rogue (1665) (from Novel)
Image 9A modern chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 10Image from a Victorian edition of Walter Scott's Waverley (1814) (from Novel)
Image 11Chinua Achebe, Buffalo, 2008 (from Novel)
Image 121719 newspaper reprint of Robinson Crusoe (from Novel)
Image 13Paper as the essential carrier: Murasaki Shikibu writing her The Tale of Genji in the early 11th century, 17th-century depiction (from Novel)
Image 14The picaresque genre began with the Spanish novel Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) (Pictured: Its title page) (from Picaresque novel)
Image 15Harlequin novels (from Romance novel)
Image 16A nineteenth-century painting by the Swiss-French painter Marc Gabriel Charles Gleyre depicting a scene from Longus's Daphnis and Chloe (from Romance novel)
Image 17Adventure novels and short stories were popular subjects for American pulp magazines. (from Adventure fiction)
Image 18A light novel bookstore in Macau (from Light novel)
Image 19Paranormal Novels: The Twilight Saga (from Romance novel)
Image 20First edition of Aleksis Kivi's The Seven Brothers (1870) (from Novel)
Image 21Dan Brown (from Novel)
Image 22One of the most influential novels on the picaresque genre was The Golden Ass by Apuleius, which he published sometime in the 2nd century AD. (ms. Vat. Lat. 2194, Vatican Library) (1345 illustration). (from Picaresque novel)
Image 23The frontispiece of a late 18th-century chapbook edition of Voltaire's The Extraordinary Tragical Fate of Calas, depicting Jean Calas being broken on the wheel (from Chapbook)
Image 24Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) (from Novel)
Image 25Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol.6, pp. 70–71 (1769) (from Novel)
Image 26Chapbook (c. 1800) of Jack the Giant Killer (from Chapbook)
Image 271474: The customer in the copyist's shop with a book he wants to have copied. This illustration of the first printed German Melusine looked back to the market of manuscripts. (from Novel)
Image 28Intimate short stories: The Court and City Vagaries (1711). (from Novel)
Image 29Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1741) (from Novel)
Image 30Woodcut of a fairy-circle from a 17th-century chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 31Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladivostok, 1995 (from Novel)

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