A
novel is a long
narrative in
literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the
medieval and early
modern romance and in the tradition of the
novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century.
Further definition of the genre is historically difficult. The construction of the narrative, the
plot, the way
reality is created in the works of fiction, the fascination of the
character study, and the use of language are usually discussed to show a novel's artistic merits. Most of these requirements were introduced in the 16th and 17th centuries in order to give fiction a justification outside the field of factual
history. The
individualism of the presentation makes the personal
memoir and the
autobiography the two closest relatives among the genres of modern histories.
[edit] Definition
 Gerard ter Borch, young man reading a book c.1680, the format is that of a French period novel. |
| |
 Winslow Homer, The New Novel (1877), again reading in a relaxed position |
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The fictional narrative, the novel's distinct "literary" prose, specific media requirements (the use of paper and print), a characteristic subject matter that creates both intimacy and a typical epic depth can be seen as features that developed with the Western (and modern) market of fiction. The separation of a field of histories from a field of literary fiction fueled the evolution of these features in the last 400 years.
[edit] A fictional narrative
Fictionality and the presentation in a
narrative are the two features most commonly invoked to distinguish novels from histories. In a historical perspective they are problematic criteria. Histories were supposed to be narrative projects throughout the
early modern period. Their authors could include inventions as long as they were rooted in traditional knowledge or in order to orchestrate a certain passage. 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 is eventually drawn between the debates novelists and historians are supposed to address in the West and wherever the Western pattern of debates has been introduced: 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.
The critical demand is a source of constant argument: Does the specific novel have these "eternal qualities" of art, this "deeper
meaning" an
interpretation tries to reveal? The debate itself had positive effects. It allowed critics to cherish fictions that are clearly marked as such. The novel is not a historical
forgery, it does not hide the fact that it was made with a certain design. The word
novel can appear on
book covers and
title pages; the
artistic effort or the sheer
suspense created can find a remark in a
preface or on the
blurb. Once it is stated that this is a text whose craftsmanship we should acknowledge literary critics will be responsible for the further discussion. The new responsibility (historians were the only qualified critics up into the 1750s) made it possible to publicly disqualify much of the previous fictional production: Both the early 18th-century
roman a 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. The new scandal is if it fails to offer literary merits.
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 so called "romances" had been verse epics in the
Romance language of southern France. Novel(la)s as those
Geoffrey Chaucer presented in his
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 dicisive 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 easy to translate and unlike verse pleasant to read in private silence. As rather initimate and informal language prose won the market of European fiction in the 15th century 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 needed. The development of a distinct fictional language was crucial for the genre that did not aim at forging history but at works readers would actually identify and appreciate as fictions.
The style that became characteristic of the modern novel 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 a production of style, of elegance and of class as long as class was rather defined by fashionable behaviour than by a distinct social status. 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 French 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.
[edit] Media requirements: Paper and print
The evolution of prose fiction required cheap carrier media. Unlike verse, prose can hardly be remembered with precision. Oral traditions had helped prose narrators with stock narrative patterns as employed in
fairy tales[4] and with complex plot structures, whose point they could only reach if they told the story correctly (the novels of Boccaccio and Chaucer share this mode of construction with modern
jokes, the shortest form of prose narratives still circulating in oral traditions).
Extended prose fictions needed paper to preserve their complex compositions.
Parchment had been available before the 1450s, but remained too expensive to be used for histories one would read as a private diversion. Parchment was used for prestigious and presentable volumes of verse epics their owners would have recited on festive occasions (see the
Troilus and Criseyde illustration
below). Prose was otherwise the language of scientific books. Parchments would in their case be bought by libraries. The situation changed in the course of the 14th and 15th centuries when prose legends became fashionable among the female urban elite. The fact that the new audience would read these books again and again for inspirational purposes legitimated the use of parchment in the private context.
The availability of paper as a carrier medium changed the situation for prose fiction. Paper allowed the production of cheap books one would not necessarily read twice, books one would buy exclusively for one's private diversion. The modern novel developed with the new carrier medium in Europe in the course of the 15th and 16th centuries. The arrival of the printed book pushed the generic development as it created a special tension between the privacy of the reading act and the publicity of the reading material that was sold in larger editions. The formats
duodecimo and
octavo (or small
quarto in the case of
chapbooks) immediately created books one could read privately at home or in public without the support of a table. To read novels in coffee houses or on journeys became part of the early modern reading culture.
[5] The reader who immerses him- or herself in the novel with the wish to stay undisturbed (or to be disturbed only with a look at his or her present reading) is here an early modern precursor of the modern commuter reading a novel or putting on head phones with the intention to stay private in the public. A special content matter immediately explored the new reading situations.
[edit] Special content: The novel's intricate intimacy
Whether in 11th-century Japan or 15th-century Europe, prose fiction tended to develop intimate reading situations. Verse epics had been recited to selected audiences (see the
Troilus and Criseyde illustration
below), a reception that had already allowed a greater intimacy than the performance of plays in theatres. The late medieval commercial manuscript production created a market of private books, yet it still required the customer to contact the professional copyist with the book he or she wanted to have copied (see the
Melusine illustration
below) – a situation that again restricted the development of more private reading experiences. The invention of the printing press anonymised the bookseller-text-reader constellation – the situation was especially interesting for prose fiction, a subject matter that remained publicly undiscussed almost throughout the early modern period. Booksellers and readers could pretend far into the 18th century not to know more about the particular title the new market of printed books provided. If one wanted to know what others read in novels one had to read them oneself. Prose fiction became in this situation the medium of open secrets, rumours, private and public gossip, a private, unscientific and irrelevant reading matter, yet one of public relevance as one could openly see that the book one was reading had reached the public as part of a larger edition.
Individualistic fashions, personal views, intimate feelings, secret anxieties, "conduct" and "gallantry" spread with novels. Love became the typical field of experience romances and novels would focus on, as Huet noted in his early definition: "I call them Fictions, to discriminate them from True Histories; and I add, of Love Adventures, because Love ought to be the Principal Subject of Romance"
[6] Satirical fictions widened the range of subject matter in the 17th and 18th centuries. The reader is invited to personally identify with the novel's characters (whilst historians are supposed to aim at neutrality and a public view on whatever they discuss).
The reviewing of fiction changed the situation for the fictional work in the course of the 18th century. It created a public discussion about what people were actually reading in novels. It had at the same moment the potential to divide the market into a sphere to be discussed and a low production critics would only hint at. The subcultures of trivial fiction and of genres to be sold under the counter with
pornography as its most influential field followed the arrival of literary criticism in the 1740s and 1750s.
[edit] Length and the epic depiction of life
The requirement of length is contested – in English with greater ferocity than in other languages. It rests on the consensus that the novel is today the longest genre of narrative prose, followed by the novella and the short story. The sequence has been unstable: 17th-century critics had handled the romance as the epic length performance and privileged the novel as its short rival.
The question how long a novel has to be – in order to be more than a novella – is of practical importance as most of the literary awards have developed a ranking system in which length is also a criterion of importance.
[7] The
Booker Prize has thus aroused a serious debate with its 2007 listing of
Ian McEwan's
On Chesil Beach. Critics immediately stated that McEwan had at best written a novella.
[8]
The requirement of length has been traditionally connected with the notion that epic length performances try to cope with the "totality of life".
[9] The novella is by contrast focused on a point, the short story on a situation whose full dimensions the reader has to grasp in a complex process of interpretation.
[edit] History
[edit] 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 and German "Roman", and in Portuguese "Romance") for extended narratives.
The English and Spanish decisions came with the 17th-century fashion of shorter exemplary histories. See the chapters
"Petites histoires" or "novels", 1600–1740 and
The words "novel" and "romance" in the following.
[edit] Antecedents around the world
A significant number of extended fictional prose works predate the novel, and have been cited as its antecedents. While these anticipate the novel in form and, to some extent, in substance, the early European novelists were unaware of most of these works; instead they were influenced by novellas and verse epics.
Early works of extended fictional prose include the 6th/7th-century
Daśakumāracarita by
Daṇḍin, the 7th-century
Kadambari by
Banabhatta, the 11th-century
Tale of Genji by
Murasaki Shikibu, the 12th-century
Hayy ibn Yaqdhan (or
Philosophus Autodidactus, the 17th-century Latin title) by
Ibn Tufail, the 13th-century
Theologus Autodidactus by
Ibn al-Nafis, and the 14th-century
Romance of the Three Kingdoms by
Luo Guanzhong.
Murasaki Shikibu's
Tale of Genji (1010) shows essentially all the qualities for which works such as
Marie de La Fayette's
La Princesse de Clèves (1678) have been praised: individuality of perception, an interest in character development and psychological observation. Parallel European developments did not occur for centuries, and awaited the time when the availability of paper allowed similar opportunities for composition and reception, allowing explorations of individualistic subject matter. By contrast, Ibn Tufail's
Hayy ibn Yaqdhan and Ibn al-Nafis'
Theologus Autodidactus are works of didactic philosophy and theology rather than private reading pleasure in the style of popular Western novels. In this sense,
Hayy ibn Yaqdhan would be considered an early example of a
philosophical novel,
[11][12] while
Theologus Autodidactus would be considered an early theological novel.
[13] Hayy ibn Yaqdhan is also likely to have influenced
Daniel Defoe with its story of a human outcast surviving on an island (the work was available in a new edition shortly before Defoe began his composition).
[14]
Western traditions of the modern novel reach back into the field of verse epics, though again not in an unbroken tradition. The
Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (1300–1000 BC),
Indian epics such as the
Ramayana (400 BCE and 200 CE) and
Mahabharata (4th century BC) were as unknown in early modern Europe as the Anglo-Saxon epic of
Beowulf (c. 750–1000 rediscovered in the late 18th century and early 19th century).
Homer's
Iliad and
Odyssey (9th or 8th century BC),
Virgil's
Aeneid (29–19 BC) were read by Western scholars since the Middle Ages. At the beginning of the 18th century, modern French prose translations brought Homer to a wider public, who accepted them as forerunners of the modern novel.
[15] Ancient prose narratives
[16] included a didactic strand with
Plato's dialogs, a satirical with
Petronius'
Satyricon, the incredible stories of
Lucian of Samosata, and
Lucius Apuleius' proto-
picaresque The Golden Ass and a heroic production with the romances of
Heliodorus and
Longus.
It is less easy to define the traditions of short fictions that led to the medieval novella. Jokes would fall into the broad history of the "exemplary story" that gave rise to the more complex forms of novelistic story telling. The
Bible is filled with similes and stories to be interpreted. Fiction is, as
Pierre Daniel Huet noted in his
Traitté de l'origine des romans in 1670, a rather universal phenomenon, and at the same moment one that lacks a single cause.
The problem of roots is matched by a problem of branches: the inventions of paper and
movable type helped isolated genres come together into a single market of exchange and awareness. The first languages of this new market were Spanish, French, German, Dutch and English.
[citation needed] The rise of the United States, Russia, Scandinavia and Latin America broadened the spectrum in the 19th century. A later wave of new literatures brought forth Asian and African novelists. The novel has become a global medium of national awareness, surrounded and encouraged in each country by a complex of literary criticism and literary awards. The relatively late emergence of the Latin American or African novel does not necessarily indicate lagging cultural progress leading only at a late date to the individuality that brought forth the modern novel: it may just as easily reflect late arrival of such necessary material factors as print, paper, and a marketplace.
[edit] The medieval romance and its rivals of shorter works
[edit] Romances, 1000–1500
The European tradition of the novel as the genre of extended prose fiction is rooted in the tradition of medieval "romances". Even today, most European languages make that clear by using the word
roman roughly the way that English uses the word
novel. The word
novel claims roots in the European
novella.
[10] Yet, epic length or the focus on a central hero giving the work its name (as in
Robinson Crusoe or
Oliver Twist) are features derived from the tradition of "romances". The early modern novel had preferred titles that focused on curious examples of modern life, not on heroes.
The word
roman or
romance had become a stable generic term by the beginning of the 13th century, as in the
Roman de la Rose (c. 1230), famous today in English through
Geoffrey Chaucer's late 14th-century translation. The term linked fictions back to the histories that had appeared in the
Romance language of 11th and 12th-century southern France. The central subject matter was initially derived from Roman and Greek historians. Works of the
Chanson de geste tradition revived the memory of ancient
Thebes,
Dido and
Aeneas, and
Alexander the Great. German and Dutch adaptations of the famous histories appeared in the late 12th century and early 13th century.
[17] Chaucer's
Troilus and Criseyde (1380–87) is a late example of this European fashion.
The subject matter which was to become the central theme of the genre in the 16th and 17th centuries was initially a branch of a broader genre.
Arthurian histories became a fashion in the late 12th century thanks to their ability to glorify the northern European
feudal system as an independent cultural achievement. The works of
Chrétien de Troyes set an example, in that his plot construction subjected the northern European epic traditions to ancient Greek aesthetics. The typical Arthurian romance would focus on a single hero and lead him into a double course of episodes
[18] in which he would prove both his prowess as an independent knight and his readiness to function as a perfect courtier under King Arthur. The mod
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The existence of this puzzling animal was first revealed in 1869 when a French missionary naturalist, Pere Jean Pierre Armand David, astonished fellow scientists by sending back to Paris a description, pelt and skeleton of a new species he named Ursus melanoleucus or "black white bear". He concluded that they more closely resembled those of a much smaller animal known to occupy the same territory: the red panda which looked like a cross between a raccoon and a fox, but revealed its primary ancestry with a raccoon-like body and facial stripes and long ringed tail. The stronghold of the Giant Panda is the formidable vastness of the Easter Himalayas close to the Chinese-Tibetan border, a vast wilderness of jagged peaks thrusting 20,000 feet in the air above cavernous valleys and torrential mountain streams. 
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