A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction usually written in prose and published as a book.[1] 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'.[2] 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.[3] The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, in the historical romances of Walter Scott and the Gothic novel.[4] Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne,[5] Herman Melville,[6] Ann Radcliffe,[7] and John Cowper Powys,[8] 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.[9][10] The romance, on the other hand, encompasses any fictitious narrative that emphasizes marvellous or uncommon incidents.[11][12][13] In reality, such works are nevertheless also commonly called novels, including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein[14] and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.[15]
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.[16] 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.[17] 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.[18]
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.
- ^ "Novel", A Glossary of Literary Terms (9th Edition), M. H. Abrams and Geoffrey Gall Harpham, Wadsworth Cengage Learning, Boston, 2009, p. 226.
- ^ Britannica Online Encyclopedia [1] accessed 2 August 2009
- ^ Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, rept. 1997, p. 1. Retrieved 25 April 2014.
- ^ J. A. Cuddon, Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory, ed., 4th edition, revised C. E. Preston. London: Penguin, 1999, pp. 76o-2.
- ^ The Scarlet Letter: A Romance
- ^ Melville described Moby Dick to his English publisher as "a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries," and promised it would be done by the fall. Herman Melville in Horth, Lynn, ed. (1993). Correspondence. The Writings of Herman Melville. Vol. Fourteen. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library. ISBN 0-8101-0995-6.
- ^ William Harmon & C, Hugh Holmam, A Handbook to Literature (7th edition), p. 237.
- ^ See A Glastonbury Romance.
- ^ "To Kill a Mockingbird voted greatest novel of all time". The Daily Telegraph. 16 June 2008. Archived from the original on 2022-01-11.
- ^ Moraru, Christian (1997). "From Gnosticism to "Containment": The American Novel in the Age of Suspicion". Studies in the Novel. 29 (4): 561–567. JSTOR 29533235.
- ^ M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms (7th edition), p. 192.
- ^ "Essay on Romance", Prose Works volume vi, p. 129, quoted in "Introduction" to Walter Scott's Quentin Durward, ed. Susan Maning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. xxv.
- ^ See also, Nathaniel Hawthorne's, "Preface" to The House of Seven Gables: A Romance, 1851. External link to the "Preface" below)
- ^ "The 100 best novels: No 8 – Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)". The Guardian. 11 November 2013.
- ^ Grossman, Lev (8 January 2010). "All-TIME 100 Novels". Time.
- ^ "Hayy ibn Yaqzan | Encyclopedia.com". encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 2020-05-02.
- ^ Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature. Kathleen Kuiper, ed. 1995. Merriam-Webster, Springfield, Mass.
- ^ Peraldo, Emmanuelle (2020-03-10). 300 Years of Robinsonades. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. p. 4. ISBN 978-1-5275-4840-4. Retrieved 2025-08-06.
And it is precisely the middle class that Ian Watt (1957) considers as a defining characteristic of the emerging genre of the novel: Watt sees the novel as a genre that developed in the social context of the rise of the Middle Class in England in the first half of the eighteenth century and Defoe has been considered by many critics, including Watt, as one of the fathers of the novel. In The Rise of the Novel; Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (whose subtitle clearly mentions Defoe as an actor in the rise of the genre), lan Watt wrote that "Robinson Crusoe is certainly the first novel in the sense that it is the first fictional narrative in which an ordinary person's daily activities are the center of continuous literary attention." (Watt 1957, 74) There have been disagreements on that issue, and some critics have voiced their hesitations on Robinson Crusoe as the first novel, in Reconsidering the Rise of the Novel (2000) for example. As for Defoe himself, he would never have called his writings "novels" and the "novel" is a label that was given by critics later in the eighteenth century.