A novel is a relatively long work of

narrative A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether nonfictional (memoir, biography, news report, documentary, travel literature, travelogue, etc.) or fictional (fairy tale, fable, legend, thriller (ge ...

fiction Fiction is any creative work, chiefly any narrative work, portraying individuals, events, or places that are imaginary, or in ways that are imaginary. Fictional portrayals are thus inconsistent with history, fact, or plausibility. In a traditi ...

, typically written in

prose Prose is a form of written or spoken language that follows the natural flow of speech, uses a language's ordinary grammatical structures, or follows the conventions of formal academic writing. It differs from most traditional poetry, where the f ...

and published as a

book A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical arr ...

. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the la, novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of ''novellus'', diminutive of ''novus'', meaning "new". Some novelists, including

Nathaniel Hawthorne Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was an American novelist and short story writer. His works often focus on history, morality, and religion. He was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, from a family long associated with that t ...

Herman Melville Herman Melville (Name change, born Melvill; August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American people, American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance (literature), American Renaissance period. Among his bes ...

, Ann Radcliffe,

John Cowper Powys John Cowper Powys (; 8 October 187217 June 1963) was an English philosopher, lecturer, novelist, critic and poet born in Shirley, Derbyshire, where his father was vicar of the parish church in 1871–1879. Powys appeared with a volume of verse ...

, preferred the term "romance" to describe their novels. According to

Margaret Doody Margaret Anne Doody (born September 21, 1939) is a Canadian author of historical detective fiction and feminist literary critic. She is professor of literature at the University of Notre Dame, helped found the PhD in Literature Program at Notre D ...

, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic peri ...

and

Roman novel Latin literature includes the essays, histories, poems, plays, and other writings written in the Latin language. The beginning of formal Latin literature dates to 240 BC, when the first stage play in Latin was performed in Rome. Latin literature ...

, in

Chivalric romance As a literary genre, the chivalric romance is a type of prose and verse narrative that was popular in the noble courts of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a chivalric k ...

, and in the tradition of the Italian renaissance

novella A novella is a narrative prose fiction whose length is shorter than most novels, but longer than most short stories. The English word ''novella'' derives from the Italian ''novella'' meaning a short story related to true (or apparently so) facts ...

.Margaret Anne Doody
''The True Story of the Novel''
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, rept. 1997, p. 1. Retrieved 25 April 2014. The ancient romance form was revived by

Romanticism Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate ...

, especially the

historical romance Historical romance is a broad category of mass-market fiction focusing on romantic relationships in historical periods, which Walter Scott helped popularize in the early 19th century. Varieties Viking These books feature Vikings during the Da ...

s of

Walter Scott Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832), was a Scottish novelist, poet, playwright and historian. Many of his works remain classics of European and Scottish literature, notably the novels ''Ivanhoe'', ''Rob Roy (n ...

and the

Gothic novel Gothic fiction, sometimes called Gothic horror in the 20th century, is a loose literary aesthetic of fear and haunting. The name is a reference to Gothic architecture of the European Middle Ages, which was characteristic of the settings of ea ...

. Some, including

M. H. Abrams Meyer Howard Abrams (July 23, 1912 – April 21, 2015), usually cited as M. H. Abrams, was an American literary critic, known for works on romanticism, in particular his book ''The Mirror and the Lamp''. Under Abrams's editorship, ''The Norton An ...

and Walter Scott, have argued that a novel is a fiction narrative that displays a realistic depiction of the state of a society, while the romance encompasses any fictitious narrative that emphasizes marvellous or uncommon incidents. Works of fiction that include marvellous or uncommon incidents are also novels, including ''

The Lord of the Rings ''The Lord of the Rings'' is an epic high-fantasy novel by English author and scholar J. R. R. Tolkien. Set in Middle-earth, intended to be Earth at some time in the distant past, the story began as a sequel to Tolkien's 1937 children's boo ...

'', ''

To Kill a Mockingbird ''To Kill a Mockingbird'' is a novel by the American author Harper Lee. It was published in 1960 and was instantly successful. In the United States, it is widely read in high schools and middle schools. ''To Kill a Mockingbird'' has become ...

'', and ''

Frankenstein ''Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus'' is an 1818 novel written by English author Mary Shelley. ''Frankenstein'' tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific ex ...

''. "Romances" are works of fiction whose main emphasis is on marvellous or unusual incidents, and should not be confused with the

romance novel A romance novel or romantic novel generally refers to a type of genre fiction novel which places its primary focus on the relationship and romantic love between two people, and usually has an "emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending." Pre ...

, a type of

genre fiction Genre fiction, also known as popular fiction, is a term used in the book-trade for fictional works written with the intent of fitting into a specific literary genre, in order to appeal to readers and fans already familiar with that genre. A num ...

that focuses on romantic love.

Murasaki Shikibu was a Japanese novelist, poet and lady-in-waiting at the Imperial court in the Heian period. She is best known as the author of '' The Tale of Genji,'' widely considered to be one of the world's first novels, written in Japanese between abou ...

's ''

Tale of Genji Tale may refer to: * Narrative, or story, a report of real or imaginary connected events * TAL effector (TALE), a type of DNA binding protein * Tale, Albania, a resort town * Tale, Iran, a village * Tale, Maharashtra, a village in Ratnagiri distri ...

'', an early 11th-century Japanese text, has sometimes been described as the world's first novel based on its early use of the experience of intimacy in a narrative form, but there is considerable debate over this — there were certainly long fictional prose works that preceded it. Spread of printed books in China led to the appearance of classical Chinese novels by the

Ming dynasty The Ming dynasty (), officially the Great Ming, was an Dynasties in Chinese history, imperial dynasty of China, ruling from 1368 to 1644 following the collapse of the Mongol Empire, Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. The Ming dynasty was the last ort ...

(1368–1644) and

Qing dynasty The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing,, was a Manchu-led imperial dynasty of China and the last orthodox dynasty in Chinese history. It emerged from the Later Jin dynasty founded by the Jianzhou Jurchens, a Tungusic-speak ...

(1616-1911). An early example from Europe was written in Muslim Spain by the

Sufi Sufism ( ar, ''aṣ-ṣūfiyya''), also known as Tasawwuf ( ''at-taṣawwuf''), is a mystic body of religious practice, found mainly within Sunni Islam but also within Shia Islam, which is characterized by a focus on Islamic spirituality, ...

writer Ibn Tufayl entitled ''

Hayy ibn Yaqdhan ''Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān'' () is an Arabic philosophical novel and an allegorical tale written by Ibn Tufail (c. 1105 – 1185) in the early 12th century in Al-Andalus. Names by which the book is also known include the ('The Self-Taught Philosop ...

''. 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 A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living writing novels and other fiction, while others aspire to ...

of the

modern era The term modern period or modern era (sometimes also called modern history or modern times) is the period of history that succeeds the Middle Ages (which ended approximately 1500 AD). This terminology is a historical periodization that is applie ...

.''Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature''. Kathleen Kuiper, ed. 1995. Merriam-Webster, Springfield, Mass. Literary historian

Ian Watt Ian Watt (9 March 1917 – 13 December 1999) was a literary critic, literary historian and professor of English at Stanford University. His ''The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding'' (1957) is an important work in the h ...

, in ''The Rise of the Novel'' (1957), argued that the modern novel was born in the early 18th century. Recent technological developments have led to many novels also being published in non-print media: this includes

audio book An audiobook (or a talking book) is a recording of a book or other work being read out loud. A reading of the complete text is described as "unabridged", while readings of shorter versions are abridgements. Spoken audio has been available in sc ...

web novel Web fiction is written works of literature available primarily or solely on the Internet. A common type of web fiction is the web serial. The term comes from old serial stories that were once published regularly in newspapers and magazines. Unlike ...

s, and

ebook An ebook (short for electronic book), also known as an e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. Alt ...

s. Another non-traditional fiction format can be found in some

graphic novel A graphic novel is a long-form, fictional work of sequential art. The term ''graphic novel'' is often applied broadly, including fiction, non-fiction, and anthologized work, though this practice is highly contested by comic scholars and industry ...

s. While these

comic book A comic book, also called comicbook, comic magazine or (in the United Kingdom and Ireland) simply comic, is a publication that consists of comics art in the form of sequential juxtaposed panels that represent individual scenes. Panels are of ...

versions of works of fiction have their origins in the 19th century, they have only become popular more recently.

Defining the genre

Tosa Mitsuoki—Portrait of Murasaki Shikibu

A novel is a long, fictional narrative. The novel in the

usually makes use of a literary prose style. The development of the prose novel at this time was encouraged by innovations in

printing Printing is a process for mass reproducing text and images using a master form or template. The earliest non-paper products involving printing include cylinder seals and objects such as the Cyrus Cylinder and the Cylinders of Nabonidus. The ea ...

, and the introduction of cheap paper in the 15th century. Several characteristics of a novel might include: *Fictional narrative:

Fiction Fiction is any creative work, chiefly any narrative work, portraying individuals, events, or places that are imaginary, or in ways that are imaginary. Fictional portrayals are thus inconsistent with history, fact, or plausibility. In a traditi ...

ality is most commonly cited as distinguishing novels from

historiography Historiography is the study of the methods of historians in developing history as an academic discipline, and by extension is any body of historical work on a particular subject. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians ha ...

. However this can be a problematic criterion. Throughout the early modern period authors of historical narratives would often include inventions rooted in traditional beliefs in order to embellish a passage of text or add credibility to an opinion. Historians would also 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 clarity and detail not found in works of history. Several novels, for example

Ông cố vấn Ong is a Hokkien romanization of several Chinese surnames: ('' Wáng'' in Hanyu Pinyin), (also ''Wāng''), (traditional) or ( simplified; '' Huáng''); and (Weng). Ong or Onge is also a surname of English origin, with earliest known records f ...

written by

Hữu Mai Hữu Mai (7 May 1926 – 2007)Hữu Mai's obituary
was a

Romance language The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European languages, I ...

of southern France, especially those by

Chrétien de Troyes Chrétien de Troyes (Modern ; fro, Crestien de Troies ; 1160–1191) was a French poet and trouvère known for his writing on Arthurian subjects, and for first writing of Lancelot, Percival and the Holy Grail. Chrétien's works, including ''E ...

(late 12th century), and in

Middle English Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English p ...

(

Geoffrey Chaucer Geoffrey Chaucer (; – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for ''The Canterbury Tales''. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He wa ...

's (c. 1343 – 1400) ''

The Canterbury Tales ''The Canterbury Tales'' ( enm, Tales of Caunterbury) is a collection of twenty-four stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. It is widely regarded as Chaucer's ''Masterpiece, ...

''). Even in the 19th century, fictional narratives in verse, such as

Lord Byron George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), known simply as Lord Byron, was an English romantic poet and Peerage of the United Kingdom, peer. He was one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement, and h ...

's '' Don Juan'' (1824),

Alexander Pushkin Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (; rus, links=no, Александр Сергеевич ПушкинIn pre-Revolutionary script, his name was written ., r=Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, p=ɐlʲɪkˈsandr sʲɪrˈɡʲe(j)ɪvʲɪtɕ ˈpuʂkʲɪn, ...

's '' Yevgeniy Onegin'' (1833), and

Elizabeth Barrett Browning Elizabeth Barrett Browning (née Moulton-Barrett; 6 March 1806 – 29 June 1861) was an English poet of the Victorian era, popular in Britain and the United States during her lifetime. Born in County Durham, the eldest of 12 children, Elizabet ...

's '' Aurora Leigh'' (1856), competed with prose novels.

Vikram Seth Vikram Seth (born 20 June 1952) is an Indian novelist and poet. He has written several novels and poetry books. He has won several awards such as Padma Shri, Sahitya Academy Award, Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, WH Smith Literary Award and Crosswor ...

's '' The Golden Gate'' (1986), composed of 590 Onegin stanzas, is a more recent example of the verse novel. * Experience of intimacy: Both in 11th-century Japan and 15th-century Europe, prose fiction created intimate reading situations. Harold Bloom characterizes

Lady Murasaki was a Japanese novelist, poet and lady-in-waiting at the Imperial court in the Heian period. She is best known as the author of '' The Tale of Genji,'' widely considered to be one of the world's first novels, written in Japanese between about ...

's use of intimacy and irony in '' The Tale of Genji'' as "having anticipated Cervantes as the first novelist." On the other hand, verse epics, including the ''

Odyssey The ''Odyssey'' (; grc, Ὀδύσσεια, Odýsseia, ) is one of two major Ancient Greek literature, ancient Greek Epic poetry, epic poems attributed to Homer. It is one of the oldest extant works of literature still widely read by moder ...

'' and ''

Aeneid The ''Aeneid'' ( ; la, Aenē̆is or ) is a Latin Epic poetry, epic poem, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Troy, Trojan who fled the Trojan_War#Sack_of_Troy, fall of Troy and travelled to ...

'', had been recited to select audiences, though this was a more intimate experience than the performance of plays in theaters. A new world of individualistic fashion, personal views, intimate feelings, secret anxieties, "conduct", and "gallantry" spread with novels and the associated prose-romance. * Length: The novel is today the longest genre of narrative prose fiction, followed by the

. However, in the 17th century, critics saw the romance as of epic length and the novel as its short rival. A precise definition of the differences in length between these types of fiction, is, however, not possible. The philosopher and literary critic György Lukács argued that the requirement of length is connected with the notion that a novel should encompass the totality of life.

East Asian definition

East Asian countries, like China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan, use the word 小說 (

pinyin Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese for ...

: ''xiǎoshuō''), which literally means "small talks", to refer works of fiction of whatever length. In Chinese, Japanese and Korean cultures, the concept of novel as it is known in the Western/Anglophone world was and still is termed as "long length small talk" (長篇小說), novella as “medium length small talk” (中篇小說), and short stories as "short length small talk" (短篇小說). However, in Vietnamese culture, the term 小說 exclusively refers to 長篇小說 (long-length small talk), i.e. standard novel, while different terms are used to refer to novella and short stories. Such terms originated from ancient Chinese classification of literature works into "small talks" (tales of daily life and trivial matters) and "great talks" ("sacred" classic works of great thinkers like

Confucius Confucius ( ; zh, s=, p=Kǒng Fūzǐ, "Master Kǒng"; or commonly zh, s=, p=Kǒngzǐ, labels=no; – ) was a Chinese philosopher and politician of the Spring and Autumn period who is traditionally considered the paragon of Chinese sages. C ...

). In other words, ancient definition of "small talks" merely refer to trivial affairs, trivial facts, and can be different from the Western concept of novel. According to

Lu Xun Zhou Shuren (25 September 1881 – 19 October 1936), better known by his pen name Lu Xun (or Lu Sun; ; Wade–Giles: Lu Hsün), was a Chinese writer, essayist, poet, and literary critic. He was a leading figure of modern Chinese literature. W ...

, the word "small talks" first appeared in the works of

Zhuang Zhou Zhuang Zhou (), commonly known as Zhuangzi (; ; literally "Master Zhuang"; also rendered in the Wade–Giles romanization as Chuang Tzu), was an influential Chinese philosopher who lived around the 4th century BCE during the Warring States ...

, which coined such word. Laters scholars also provided similar definition, such as Han dynasty historian

Ban Gu Ban Gu (AD32–92) was a Chinese historian, politician, and poet best known for his part in compiling the ''Book of Han'', the second of China's 24 dynastic histories. He also wrote a number of '' fu'', a major literary form, part prose ...

categorized all the trivial stories and gossips collected by local government magistrates as "small talks".

Hồ Nguyên Trừng Hồ Nguyên Trừng (chữ Hán: 胡元澄, pinyin Hu Yuancheng; also known as Lê Trừng, ; 1374? – 1446?) was a Trần dynasty, Vietnamese scholar, official, and engineer in exile in Ming dynasty, China. He was the oldest son of Emperor Hồ Q ...

classified his memoir collection

Nam Ông mộng lục Dream memoir of Southern Man ( vi-hantu, 南翁夢錄, link=no, Vietnamese language, Vietnamese : ''Nam Ông mộng lục'') is a memoir written by Vietnamese official Hồ Nguyên Trừng during his exile in Ming dynasty in the early 15th century. ...

as "small talks" clearly with the meaning of "trivial facts" rather than the Western definition of novel. Such classification and also left strong legacy in several East Asian interpretations of Western definition of novel at the time when Western literature was first introduced to East Asian countries. For example, Thanh Lãng and

Nhất Linh Nguyễn Tường Tam (chữ Hán: 阮祥三 or 阮祥叄; Cẩm Giàng District, Cẩm Giàng, Hải Dương 25 July 1906 – Saigon, 7 July 1963) better known by his pen-name Nhất Linh (一灵, "One Spirit") was a Vietnamese writer, editor and ...

classified the epic poems such as

The Tale of Kiều ''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the m ...

as "novel", while Trần Chánh Chiếu emphasized the "belongs to the commoners", "trivial daily talks" aspect in one of his work.

Early novels

The earliest novels include classical Greek and Latin prose narratives from the first century BC to the second century AD, such as Chariton's ''

Callirhoe Callirrhoe (, grc, Καλλιρρόη; also Callirhoe) may refer to: * Callirhoe (mythology), several figures in Greek mythology, including: ** Callirrhoe (Oceanid), daughter of Oceanus and Tethys ** Callirrhoe (daughter of Achelous) * Callirrhoe ...

'' (mid 1st century), which is "arguably the earliest surviving Western novel", as well as

Petronius Gaius Petronius Arbiter"Gaius Petronius Arbiter"
Satyricon'',

Lucian Lucian of Samosata, '; la, Lucianus Samosatensis ( 125 – after 180) was a Hellenized Syrian satirist, rhetorician and pamphleteer Pamphleteer is a historical term for someone who creates or distributes pamphlets, unbound (and therefore ...

's '' True Story'', Apuleius' '' The Golden Ass'', and the anonymous '' Aesop Romance'' and '' Alexander Romance.'' The style of these works was later adapted in later

Byzantine novel Byzantine romance represents a revival of the ancient Greek romance of Roman times. Works in this category were written by Byzantine Greeks of the Eastern Roman Empire during the 12th century. History Under the Comnenian dynasty, Byzantine writ ...

s such as ''Hysimine and Hysimines'' by Eustathios MakrembolitesJohn Robert Morgan, Richard Stoneman, ''Greek fiction: the Greek novel in context'' (Routledge, 1994), Gareth L. Schmeling, and Tim Whitmarsh (hrsg.) ''The Cambridge companion to the Greek and Roman novel'' (Cambridge University Press 2008). Narrative forms were also developed in Classical Sanskrit in the 5th through 8th centuries, such as ''

Vasavadatta :''Vasavadatta is also a character in the Svapnavasavadatta and the Vina-Vasavadatta'' ''Vasavadatta'' ( sa, वासवदत्ता, ) is a classical Sanskrit romantic tale (''akhyayika'') written in an ornate style by Subandhu, whose ti ...

'' by Subandhu, '' Daśakumāracarita and Avantisundarīkathā'' by Daṇḍin, '' Kadambari'' by Banabhatta. Urbanization and the spread of printed books in

Song Dynasty The Song dynasty (; ; 960–1279) was an imperial dynasty of China that began in 960 and lasted until 1279. The dynasty was founded by Emperor Taizu of Song following his usurpation of the throne of the Later Zhou. The Song conquered the rest ...

(960–1279) China led to the evolution of oral storytelling into fictional

novels A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself ...

by the

(1368–1644). Parallel European developments did not occur until after the invention of the printing press by

Johannes Gutenberg Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg (; – 3 February 1468) was a German inventor and Artisan, craftsman who introduced letterpress printing to Europe with his movable type, movable-type printing press. Though not the first of its ki ...

in 1439, and the rise of the publishing industry over a century later allowed for similar opportunities. The modern European novel is often said to have begun with '' Don Quixote'' in 1605.

Medieval period 1100–1500

Chivalric romances

Romance or chivalric romance is a type of

verse Verse may refer to: Poetry * Verse, an occasional synonym for poetry * Verse, a metrical structure, a stanza * Blank verse, a type of poetry having regular meter but no rhyme * Free verse, a type of poetry written without the use of strict me ...

popular in the aristocratic circles of

High Medieval The High Middle Ages, or High Medieval Period, was the period of European history that lasted from AD 1000 to 1300. The High Middle Ages were preceded by the Early Middle Ages and were followed by the Late Middle Ages, which ended around AD 1500 ...

and

Early Modern Europe Early modern Europe, also referred to as the post-medieval period, is the period of European history between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, roughly the late 15th century to the late 18th century. Histori ...

. They were marvel-filled adventures, often of a knight-errant with

hero A hero (feminine: heroine) is a real person or a main fictional character who, in the face of danger, combats adversity through feats of ingenuity, courage, or Physical strength, strength. Like other formerly gender-specific terms (like ...

ic qualities, who undertakes a

quest A quest is a journey toward a specific mission or a goal. The word serves as a plot device in mythology and fiction: a difficult journey towards a goal, often symbolic or allegorical. Tales of quests figure prominently in the folklore of ever ...

, yet it is "the emphasis on heterosexual love and courtly manners distinguishes it from the '' chanson de geste'' and other kinds of

epic Epic commonly refers to: * Epic poetry, a long narrative poem celebrating heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation * Epic film, a genre of film with heroic elements Epic or EPIC may also refer to: Arts, entertainment, and medi ...

, which involve heroism." In later romances, particularly those of French origin, there is a marked tendency to emphasize themes of

courtly love Courtly love ( oc, fin'amor ; french: amour courtois ) was a medieval European literary conception of love that emphasized nobility and chivalry. Medieval literature is filled with examples of knights setting out on adventures and performing vari ...

. Originally, romance literature was written in

Old French Old French (, , ; Modern French: ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France from approximately the 8th to the 14th centuries. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a linkage of Romance dialects, mutually intelligib ...

Anglo-Norman Anglo-Norman may refer to: *Anglo-Normans, the medieval ruling class in England following the Norman conquest of 1066 *Anglo-Norman language **Anglo-Norman literature *Anglo-Norman England, or Norman England, the period in English history from 1066 ...

and

Occitan Occitan may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to the Occitania territory in parts of France, Italy, Monaco and Spain. * Something of, from, or related to the Occitania administrative region of France. * Occitan language Occitan (; o ...

, later, in

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

, Italian and

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ger ...

. During the early 13th century, romances were increasingly written as prose. The shift from verse to prose dates from the early 13th century. The '' Prose Lancelot'' or ''Vulgate Cycle'' includes passages from that period. This collection indirectly led to Thomas Malory's ''

Le Morte d'Arthur ' (originally written as '; inaccurate Middle French for "The Death of Arthur") is a 15th-century Middle English prose reworking by Sir Thomas Malory of tales about the legendary King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin and the Knights of the Rou ...

'' of the early 1470s. Prose became increasingly attractive because it enabled writers to associate popular stories with serious histories traditionally composed in prose, and could also be more easily translated. Popular literature also drew on themes of romance, but with

ironic Irony (), in its broadest sense, is the juxtaposition of what on the surface appears to be the case and what is actually the case or to be expected; it is an important rhetorical device and literary technique. Irony can be categorized into ...

satiric Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of shaming or e ...

burlesque A burlesque is a literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects.

intent. Romances reworked

legend A legend is a Folklore genre, genre of folklore that consists of a narrative featuring human actions, believed or perceived, both by teller and listeners, to have taken place in human history. Narratives in this genre may demonstrate human valu ...

fairy tale A fairy tale (alternative names include fairytale, fairy story, magic tale, or wonder tale) is a short story that belongs to the folklore genre. Such stories typically feature magic (paranormal), magic, incantation, enchantments, and mythical ...

s, and history, but by about 1600 they were out of fashion, and Miguel de Cervantes famously

burlesque A burlesque is a literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects.

d them in '' Don Quixote'' (1605). Still, the modern image of the medieval is more influenced by the romance than by any other medieval genre, and the word "medieval" evokes knights, distressed damsels, dragons, and such tropes.

The novella

The term "novel" originates from the production of short stories, or

that remained part of a European oral culture of storytelling into the late 19th century. Fairy tales, jokes, and humorous stories designed to make a point in a conversation, and the exemplum a priest would insert in a sermon belong into this tradition. Written collections of such stories circulated in a wide range of products from practical compilations of examples designed for the use of clerics to compilations of various stories such as Boccaccio's ''

Decameron ''The Decameron'' (; it, label=Italian, Decameron or ''Decamerone'' ), subtitled ''Prince Galehaut'' (Old it, Prencipe Galeotto, links=no ) and sometimes nicknamed ''l'Umana commedia'' ("the Human comedy", as it was Boccaccio that dubbed Dan ...

'' (1354) and

's ''

Canterbury Tales ''The Canterbury Tales'' ( enm, Tales of Caunterbury) is a collection of twenty-four stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. It is widely regarded as Chaucer's ''magnum opus' ...

'' (1386–1400). The ''Decameron'' was a compilation of one hundred

novelle A novella is a narrative prose fiction whose length is shorter than most novels, but longer than most short stories. The English word ''novella'' derives from the Italian ''novella'' meaning a short story related to true (or apparently so) facts ...

told by ten people—seven women and three men—fleeing the

Black Death The Black Death (also known as the Pestilence, the Great Mortality or the Plague) was a bubonic plague pandemic occurring in Western Eurasia and North Africa from 1346 to 1353. It is the most fatal pandemic recorded in human history, causi ...

by escaping from

Florence Florence ( ; it, Firenze ) is a city in Central Italy and the capital city of the Tuscany region. It is the most populated city in Tuscany, with 383,083 inhabitants in 2016, and over 1,520,000 in its metropolitan area.Bilancio demografico an ...

to the Fiesole hills, in 1348.

Renaissance period: 1500–1700

1474 Melusine Ausgabe Augsburg Johann Bämler Blatt 2

The modern distinction between history and fiction did not exist in the early sixteenth century and the grossest improbabilities pervade many historical accounts found in the early modern print market.

William Caxton William Caxton ( – ) was an English merchant, diplomat and writer. He is thought to be the first person to introduce a printing press into England, in 1476, and as a printer (publisher), printer to be the first English retailer of printed boo ...

's 1485 edition of Thomas Malory's ''

'' (1471) was sold as a true history, though the story unfolded in a series of magical incidents and historical improbabilities.

Sir John Mandeville Sir John Mandeville is the supposed author of ''The Travels of Sir John Mandeville'', a travel memoir which first circulated between 1357 and 1371. The earliest-surviving text is in French. By aid of translations into many other languages, the ...

's ''Voyages'', written in the 14th century, but circulated in printed editions throughout the 18th century, was filled with natural wonders, which were accepted as fact, like the one-footed Ethiopians who use their extremity as an umbrella against the desert sun. Both works eventually came to be viewed as works of fiction. In the 16th and 17th centuries two factors led to the separation of history and fiction. The invention of printing immediately created a new market of comparatively cheap entertainment and knowledge in the form of chapbooks. The more elegant production of this genre by 17th- and 18th-century authors were ''belles lettres—''that is, a market that would be neither low nor academic. The second major development was the first best-seller of modern fiction, the Spanish ''Amadis de Gaula'', by García Montalvo. However, it was not accepted as an example of ''belles lettres''. The ''Amadis'' eventually became the archetypical romance, in contrast with the modern novel which began to be developed in the 17th century.

Chapbooks

A chapbook is an early type of popular literature printed in early modern Europe. Produced cheaply, chapbooks were commonly small, paper-covered booklets, usually printed on a single sheet folded into books of 8, 12, 16 and 24 pages. They were often illustrated with crude woodcuts, which sometimes bore no relation to the text. When illustrations were included in chapbooks, they were considered popular prints. The tradition arose in the 16th century, as soon as printing press, printed books became affordable, and rose to its height during the 17th and 18th centuries. Many different kinds of ephemera and popular or folk literature were published as chapbooks, such as almanacs, children's literature, Folklore, folk tales, nursery rhymes, pamphlets, poetry, and political and religious Tract (literature), tracts. The term "chapbook" for this type of literature was coined in the 19th century. The corresponding French and German terms are ''bibliothèque bleue'' (blue book) and ''Volksbuch'', respectively. The principal historical subject matter of chapbooks was abridgements of ancient historians, popular medieval histories of knights, stories of comical heroes, religious legends, and collections of jests and fables. The new printed books reached the households of urban citizens and country merchants who visited the cities as traders. Cheap printed histories were, in the 17th and 18th centuries, especially popular among apprentices and younger urban readers of both sexes. The early modern market, from the 1530s and 1540s, divided into low chapbooks and high market expensive, fashionable, elegant belles lettres. The ''Amadis'' and François Rabelais, Rabelais' ''Gargantua and Pantagruel'' were important publications with respect to this divide. Both books specifically addressed the new customers of popular histories, rather than readers of ''belles lettres''. The Amadis was a multi–volume fictional history of style, that aroused a debate about style and elegance as it became the first best-seller of popular fiction. On the other hand, ''Gargantua and Pantagruel'', while it adopted the form of modern popular history, in fact satirized that genre's stylistic achievements. The division, between low and high literature, became especially visible with books that appeared on both the popular and ''belles lettres'' markets in the course of the 17th and 18th centuries: low chapbooks included abridgments of books such as ''Don Quixote''. The term "chapbook" is also in use for present-day publications, commonly short, inexpensive booklets.

Heroic romances

Heroic Romance is a genre of imaginative literature, which flourished in the 17th century, principally in France. The beginnings of modern fiction in France took a pseudo-bucolic form, and the celebrated ''L'Astrée'', (1610) of Honore d'Urfe (1568–1625), which is the earliest French novel, is properly styled a pastoral. Although its action was, in the main, languid and sentimental, there was a side of the Astree which encouraged that extravagant love of glory, that spirit of " panache", which was now rising to its height in France. That spirit it was which animated Marin le Roy de Gomberville (1603–1674), who was the inventor of what have since been known as the Heroical Romances. In these there was experienced a violent recrudescence of the old medieval elements of romance, the impossible valour devoted to a pursuit of the impossible beauty, but the whole clothed in the language and feeling and atmosphere of the age in which the books were written. In order to give point to the chivalrous actions of the heroes, it was always hinted that they were well-known public characters of the day in a romantic disguise.

Satirical romances

Stories of witty cheats were an integral part of the European novella with its tradition of fabliaux. Significant examples include ''Till Eulenspiegel'' (1510), ''Lazarillo de Tormes'' (1554), Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Grimmelshausen's ''Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus, Simplicissimus Teutsch'' (1666–1668) and in England Richard Head's ''The English Rogue'' (1665). The tradition that developed with these titles focused on a hero and his life. The adventures led to satirical encounters with the real world with the hero either becoming the pitiable victim or the rogue who exploited the vices of those he met. A second tradition of satirical romances can be traced back to Heinrich Wittenwiler's ''Ring'' (c. 1410) and to François Rabelais' ''Gargantua and Pantagruel'' (1532–1564), which parodied and satirized heroic romances, and did this mostly by dragging them into the low realm of the burlesque. ''Don Quixote'' modified the satire of romances: its hero lost contact with reality by reading too many romances in the Amadisian tradition. Other important works of the tradition are Paul Scarron's ''Roman Comique'' (1651–57), the anonymous French ''Rozelli'' with its satire on Europe's religions, Alain-René Lesage's ''Gil Blas'' (1715–1735), Henry Fielding's ''Joseph Andrews'' (1742) and ''The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, Tom Jones'' (1749), and Denis Diderot's ''Jacques the Fatalist'' (1773, printed posthumously in 1796).

Histories

A market of literature in the modern sense of the word, that is a separate market for fiction and poetry, did not exist until the late seventeenth century. All books were sold under the rubric of "History and politicks" in the early 18th century, including pamphlets, memoirs, travel literature, political analysis, serious histories, romances, poetry, and novels. That fictional histories shared the same space with academic histories and modern journalism had been criticized by historians since the end of the Middle Ages: fictions were "lies" and therefore hardly justifiable at all. The climate, however, changed in the 1670s. The romance format of the quasi–historical works of Madame d'Aulnoy, César Vichard de Saint-Réal, Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras, and Anne-Marguerite Petit du Noyer, allowed the publication of histories that dared not risk an unambiguous assertion of their truth. The literary market-place of the late 17th and early 18th century employed a simple pattern of options whereby fictions could reach out into the sphere of true histories. This permitted its authors to claim they had published fiction, not truth, if they ever faced allegations of libel. Prefaces and title pages of seventeenth and early eighteenth century fiction acknowledged this pattern: histories could claim to be romances, but threaten to relate true events, as in the ''Roman à clef''. Other works could, conversely, claim to be factual histories, yet earn the suspicion that they were wholly invented. A further differentiation was made between private and public history: Daniel Defoe's ''Robinson Crusoe'' was, within this pattern, neither a "romance" nor a "novel". It smelled of romance, yet the preface stated that it should most certainly be read as a true private history.

Cervantes and the modern novel

The rise of the modern novel as an alternative to the chivalric romance began with the publication of Miguel de Cervantes' ''Novelas ejemplares, Novelas Exemplares'' (1613). It continued with Paul Scarron, Scarron's ''Roman Comique'' (the first part of which appeared in 1651), whose heroes noted the rivalry between French romances and the new Spanish genre. Late 17th-century critics looked back on the history of prose fiction, proud of the generic shift that had taken place, leading towards the modern novel/novella. The first perfect works in French were those of Scarron and Madame de La Fayette's "Spanish history" ''Zayde'' (1670). The development finally led to her ''La Princesse de Clèves, Princesse de Clèves'' (1678), the first novel with what would become characteristic French subject matter. Europe witnessed the generic shift in the titles of works in French published in Holland, which supplied the international market and English publishers exploited the novel/romance controversy in the 1670s and 1680s. Contemporary critics listed the advantages of the new genre: brevity, a lack of ambition to produce epic poetry in prose; the style was fresh and plain; the focus was on modern life, and on heroes who were neither good nor bad. The novel's potential to become the medium of urban gossip and scandal fuelled the rise of the novel/novella. Stories were offered as allegedly true recent histories, not for the sake of scandal but strictly for the moral lessons they gave. To prove this, fictionalized names were used with the true names in a separate key. The ''Mercure Gallant'' set the fashion in the 1670s. Collections of letters and memoirs appeared, and were filled with the intriguing new subject matter and the epistolary novel grew from this and led to the first full blown example of scandalous fiction in Aphra Behn's ''Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister'' (1684/ 1685/ 1687). Before the rise of the literary novel, reading novels had only been a form of entertainment. However, one of the earliest English novels, Daniel Defoe's ''Robinson Crusoe'' (1719), has elements of the romance, unlike these novels, because of its exotic setting and story of survival in isolation. ''Crusoe'' lacks almost all of the elements found in these new novels: wit, a fast narration evolving around a group of young fashionable urban heroes, along with their intrigues, a scandalous moral, gallant talk to be imitated, and a brief, concise plot. The new developments did, however, lead to Eliza Haywood's epic length novel, ''Love in Excess'' (1719/20) and to Samuel Richardson's ''Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded'' (1741). Some literary historians date the beginning of the English novel with Richardson's ''Pamela'', rather than ''Crusoe.''Cevasco, George A.
''Pearl Buck and the Chinese Novel''
p. 442. Asian Studies – Journal of Critical Perspectives on Asia, 1967, 5:3, pp. 437–51.

18th-century novels

The idea of the "rise of the novel" in the 18th century is especially associated with

's influential study ''The Rise of the Novel'' (1957). In Watt's conception, a rise in fictional realism during the 18th century came to distinguish the novel from earlier prose narratives.

Philosophical novel

1769 Laurence Sterne Tristram Shandy v6 p70

The rising status of the novel in eighteenth century can be seen in the development of philosophical and experimental novels. Philosophical fiction was not exactly new. Plato's dialogues were embedded in fictional narratives and his ''Republic (Plato), Republic'' is an early example of a Utopia. Ibn Tufail's 12th century ''Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, Philosophus Autodidacticus'' with its story of a human outcast surviving on an island, and the 13th century response by Ibn al-Nafis, ''Theologus Autodidactus'' are both didactic narrative works that can be though of as early examples of a philosophicalSamar Attar, ''The Vital Roots of European Enlightenment: Ibn Tufayl's Influence on Modern Western Thought'', Lexington Books, . and a theological novel,Muhsin Mahdi (1974), "''The Theologus Autodidactus of Ibn at-Nafis'' by Max Meyerhof, Joseph Schacht", respectively. The tradition of works of fiction that were also philosophical texts continued with Thomas More's ''Utopia (book), Utopia'' (1516) and Tommaso Campanella's ''The City of the Sun, City of the Sun'' (1602). However, the actual tradition of the philosophical novel came into being in the 1740s with new editions of More's work under the title ''Utopia: or the happy republic; a philosophical romance'' (1743). Voltaire wrote in this genre in ''Micromégas, Micromegas: a comic romance, which is a biting satire on philosophy, ignorance, and the self-conceit of mankind'' (1752, English 1753). His ''Zadig'' (1747) and ''Candide'' (1759) became central texts of the French Age of Enlightenment, Enlightenment and of the modern novel. An example of the experimental novel is Laurence Sterne's ''The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman'' (1759–1767), with its rejection of continuous narration. In it the author not only addresses readers in his preface but speaks directly to them in his fictional narrative. In addition to Sterne's narrative experiments, there has visual experiments, such as a marbled page, a black page to express sorrow, and a page of lines to show the plot lines of the book. The novel as a whole focuses on the problems of language, with constant regard to John Locke's theories in ''An Essay Concerning Human Understanding''.

The romance genre in the 18th century

The rise of the word novel at the cost of its rival, the romance, remained a Spanish and English phenomenon, and though readers all over Western Europe had welcomed the novel(la) or short history as an alternative in the second half of the 17th century, only the English and the Spanish had, however, openly discredited the romance. But the change of taste was brief and François Fénelon, Fénelon's ''Telemachus'' [''Les Aventures de Télémaque''] (1699/1700) already exploited a nostalgia for the old romances with their heroism and professed virtue. Jane Barker explicitly advertised her ''Exilius'' as "A new Romance", "written after the Manner of Telemachus", in 1715. Robinson Crusoe spoke of his own story as a "romance", though in the preface to the third volume, published in 1720, Defoe attacks all who said "that [...] the Story is feign'd, that the Names are borrow'd, and that it is all a Romance; that there never were any such Man or Place". The late 18th century brought an answer with the romanticism, Romantic Movement's readiness to reclaim the word romance, with the gothic romance, and the historical novels of

. ''Robinson Crusoe'' now became a "novel" in this period, that is a work of the new realistic fiction created in the 18th century.

The sentimental novel

Sentimental novels relied on emotional responses, and feature scenes of distress and tenderness, and the plot is arranged to advance emotions rather than action. The result is a valorization of "fine feeling", displaying the characters as models of refined, sensitive emotional affect. The ability to display such feelings was thought at this time to show character and experience, and to help shape positive social life and relationships. An example of this genre is Samuel Richardson's ''Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded'' (1740), composed "to cultivate the Principles of Virtue and Religion in the Minds of the Youth of Both Sexes", which focuses on a potential victim, a heroine that has all the modern virtues and who is vulnerable because her low social status and her occupation as servant of a libertine who falls in love with her. She, however, ends in reforming her antagonist. Male heroes adopted the new sentimental novel, sentimental character traits in the 1760s. Laurence Sterne's Yorick, the hero of the ''A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, Sentimental Journey'' (1768) did so with an enormous amount of humour. Oliver Goldsmith's ''The Vicar of Wakefield, Vicar of Wakefield'' (1766) and Henry Mackenzie's ''Man of Feeling'' (1771) produced the far more serious role models. These works inspired a Subculture, sub- and counterculture of pornography, pornographic novels, for which Greek and Latin authors in translations had provided elegant models from the last century. Pornography includes John Cleland's ''Fanny Hill'' (1748), which offered an almost exact reversal of the plot of novels that emphasised virtue. The prostitute Fanny Hill learns to enjoy her work and establishes herself as a free and economically independent individual, in editions one could only expect to buy under the counter. Less virtuous protagonists can also be found in satirical novels, like Richard Head's ''English Rogue'' (1665), that feature brothels, while women authors like Aphra Behn had offered their heroines alternative careers as precursors of the 19th-century femme fatale, femmes fatales. The genre evolves in the 1770s with, for example, Werther in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's ''The Sorrows of Young Werther'' (1774) realising that it is impossible for him to integrate into the new conformist society, and Pierre Choderlos de Laclos in ''Les Liaisons dangereuses'' (1782) showing a group of aristocrats playing games of intrigue and amorality..

The social context of the 18th century novel

Changing cultural status

By around 1700, fiction was no longer a predominantly aristocratic entertainment, and printed books had soon gained the power to reach readers of almost all classes, though the reading habits differed and to follow fashions remained a privilege. Spain was a trendsetter into the 1630s but French authors superseded Miguel de Cervantes, Cervantes, Francisco de Quevedo, de Quevedo, and Mateo Alemán, Alemán in the 1640s. As Pierre Daniel Huet, Huet was to note in 1670, the change was one of manners. The new French works taught a new, on the surface freer, gallant exchange between the sexes as the essence of life at the French court. The situation changed again from 1660s into the 1690s when works by French authors were published in Holland out of the reach of French censors. Dutch publishing houses pirated fashionable books from France and created a new market of political and scandalous fiction. This led to a market of European rather than French fashions in the early 18th century. 1711 The Court and City Vagaries

By the 1680s fashionable political European novels had inspired a second wave of private scandalous publications and generated new productions of local importance. Women authors reported on politics and on their private love affairs in The Hague and in London. German students imitated them to boast of their private amours in fiction. The London, the anonymous international market of the Netherlands, publishers in Hamburg and Leipzig generated new public spheres. Once private individuals, such as students in university towns and daughters of London's upper class began to write novels based on questionable reputations, the public began to call for a reformation of manners. An important development in Britain, at the beginning of the century, was that new journals like ''The Spectator (1711), The Spectator'' and ''Tatler (1709), The Tatler'' reviewed novels. In Germany Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's ''Briefe, die neuste Literatur betreffend'' (1758) appeared in the middle of the century with reviews of art and fiction. By the 1780s such reviews played had an important role in introducing new works of fiction to the public. Influenced by the new journals, reform became the main goal of the second generation of eighteenth century novelists. ''The Spectator'' Number 10 had stated that the aim was now "to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality […] to bring philosophy out of the closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffeehouses"). Constructive criticism of novels had until then been rare. The first treatise on the history of the novel was a preface to Marie de La Fayette's novel ''Zayde'' (1670). A much later development was the introduction of novels into school and later university curricula.

The acceptance of novels as literature

The French churchman and scholar Pierre Daniel Huet's ''Traitté de l'origine des romans'' (1670) laid the ground for a greater acceptance of the novel as literature, that is comparable to the classics, in the early 18th century. The theologian had not only dared to praise fictions, but he had also explained techniques of theological interpretation of fiction, which was a novelty. Furthermore, readers of novels and romances could gain insight not only into their own culture, but also that of distant, exotic countries. When the decades around 1700 saw the appearance of new editions of the classical authors Petronius,

, and Heliodorus of Emesa. the publishers equipped them with prefaces that referred to Huet's treatise. and the Western canon, canon it had established. Also exotic works of Middle Eastern fiction entered the market that gave insight into Islamic culture. ''The Book of One Thousand and One Nights'' was first published in Europe from 1704 to 1715 in French, and then translated immediately into English and German, and was seen as a contribution to Huet's history of romances. The English, ''Select Collection of Novels in six volumes'' (1720–22), is a milestone in this development of the novel's prestige. It included Huet's ''Treatise'', along with the European tradition of the modern novel of the day: that is, novella from Niccolò Machiavelli, Machiavelli's to Marie de La Fayette's masterpieces. Aphra Behn's novels had appeared in the 1680s but became classics when reprinted in collections. François Fénelon, Fénelon's ''Telemachus'' (1699/1700) became a classic three years after its publication. New authors entering the market were now ready to use their personal names rather than pseudonyms, including Eliza Haywood, who in 1719 following in the footsteps of Aphra Behn used her name with unprecedented pride.

19th-century novels

Romanticism

Walter Scott Waverley illustration (Pettie-Huth)

The very word romanticism is connected to the idea of romance, and the romance genre experienced a revival, at the end of the 18th century, with gothic fiction, that began in 1764 with Horace Walpole's ''The Castle of Otranto'', subtitled (in its second edition) "A Gothic Story". Subsequent important gothic works are Ann Radcliffe's ''The Mysteries of Udolpho'' (1794) and Matthew Gregory Lewis, 'Monk' Lewis's ''The Monk'' (1795). Seitseman veljekset

The new romances challenged the idea that the novel involved a realism (arts), realistic depiction of life, and destabilized the difference the critics had been trying to establish, between serious classical art and popular fiction. Gothic romances exploited the grotesque, and some critics thought that their subject matter deserved less credit than the worst medieval tales of Arthurian romance, Arthurian knighthood. The authors of this new type of fiction were accused of exploiting all available topics to thrill, arouse, or horrify their audience. These new romanticism, romantic novelists, however, claimed that they were exploring the entire realm of fictionality. And psychological interpreters, in the early 19th century, read these works as encounters with the deeper hidden truth of the human imagination: this included sexuality, Angst, anxieties, and insatiable desire (emotion), desires. Under such readings, novels were described as exploring deeper human motives, and it was suggested that such artistic freedom would reveal what had not previously been openly visible. The romances of Marquis de Sade, de Sade, ''The 120 Days of Sodom, Les 120 Journées de Sodome'' (1785), Edgar Allan Poe, Poe's ''Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque'' (1840), Mary Shelley, ''

'' (1818), and E.T.A. Hoffmann, ''Die Elixiere des Teufels'' (1815), would later attract 20th-century psychoanalysts and supply the images for 20th- and 21st-century horror films, romance novel, love romances, fantasy novels, Role-playing game, role-playing computer games, and the surrealism, surrealists. The

was also important at this time. But, while earlier writers of these romances paid little attention to historical reality,

's historical novel ''Waverley (novel), Waverley'' (1814) broke with this tradition, and he invented "the true historical novel".''The Bloomsbury Guide to English Literature'', ed. Marion Wynne Davis. New York: Prentice Hall, 1990, p. 885. At the same time he was influenced by gothic romance, and had collaborated in 1801 with Matthew Lewis (writer), 'Monk' Lewis on ''Tales of Wonder''. With his Waverley novels Scott "hoped to do for the Scottish border" what Goethe and other German poets "had done for the Middle Ages, "and make its past live again in modern romance". Scott's novels "are in the mode he himself defined as romance, 'the interest of which turns upon marvelous and uncommon incidents'".''The Norton Anthology of English Literature'', vol.2, 7th edition, ed. M.H. Abrams. New York: Norton, 2000, pp. 20–21. He used his imagination to re-evaluate history by rendering things, incidents and protagonists in the way only the novelist could do. His work remained historical fiction, yet it questioned existing historical perceptions. The use of historical research was an important tool: Scott, the novelist, resorted to documentary sources as any historian would have done, but as a romantic he gave his subject a deeper imaginative and emotional significance. By combining research with "marvelous and uncommon incidents", Scott attracted a far wider market than any historian could, and was the most famous novelist of his generation, throughout Europe.

The Victorian period: 1837–1901

In the 19th century the relationship between authors, publishers, and readers, changed. Authors originally had only received payment for their manuscript, however, changes in History of copyright law, copyright laws, which began in 18th and continued into the 19th century promised royalties on all future editions. Another change in the 19th century was that novelists began to read their works in theaters, halls, and bookshops. Also during the nineteenth century the market for popular fiction grew, and competed with works of literature. New institutions like the circulating library created a new market with a mass reading public. Another difference was that novels began to deal with more difficult subjects, including current political and social issues, that were being discussed in newspapers and magazines. The idea of social responsibility became a key subject, whether of the citizen, or of the artist, with the theoretical debate concentrating on questions around the moral soundness of the modern novel. Questions about artistic integrity, as well as aestheticism, aesthetics, including, for example. the idea of "art for art's sake", proposed by writers like Oscar Wilde and Algernon Charles Swinburne, were also important. Major British writers such as Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy were influenced by the romance genre tradition of the novel, which had been revitalized during the Romantic period. The Brontë sisters were notable mid-19th-century authors in this tradition, with Anne Brontë's ''The Tenant of Wildfell Hall'', Charlotte Brontë's ''Jane Eyre'' and Emily Brontë's ''Wuthering Heights''. Publishing at the very end of the 19th century, Joseph Conrad has been called "a supreme 'romancer.'" In America "the romance ... proved to be a serious, flexible, and successful medium for the exploration of philosophical ideas and attitudes." Notable examples include

's ''The Scarlet Letter'', and

's ''Moby-Dick''.''A Handbook of Literary Terms'', 7th edition, ed. Harmon and Holman (1995), p. 450. A number of European novelists were similarly influenced during this period by the earlier romance tradition, along with the

, including Victor Hugo, with novels like ''The Hunchback of Notre-Dame'' (1831) and ''Les Misérables'' (1862), and Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov with ''A Hero of Our Time'' (1840). UncleTomsCabinCover

Many 19th-century authors dealt with significant social matters. Émile Zola's novels depicted the world of the working classes, which Karl Marx, Marx and Friedrich Engels, Engels's non-fiction explores. In the United States slavery and racism became topics of far broader public debate thanks to Harriet Beecher Stowe's ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' (1852), which dramatizes topics that had previously been discussed mainly in the abstract. Charles Dickens' novels led his readers into contemporary workhouses, and provided first-hand accounts of child labor. The treatment of the subject of war changed with Leo Tolstoy's ''War and Peace'' (1868/69), where he questions the facts provided by historians. Similarly the treatment of crime is very different in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's ''Crime and Punishment'' (1866), where the point of view is that of a criminal. Women authors had dominated fiction from the 1640s into the early 18th century, but few before George Eliot so openly questioned the role, education, and status of women in society, as she did. As the novel became a platform of modern debate, nationalist, national literatures were developed that link the present with the past in the form of the historical novel. Alessandro Manzoni's ''The Betrothed (Manzoni novel), I Promessi Sposi'' (1827) did this for Italy, while novelists in Russia and the surrounding Slavonic countries, as well as Scandinavia, did likewise. Along with this new appreciation of history, the future also became a topic for fiction. This had been done earlier in works like Samuel Madden's ''Memoirs of the Twentieth Century'' (1733) and Mary Shelley's ''The Last Man'' (1826), a work whose plot culminated in the catastrophic last days of a mankind extinguished by the plague. Edward Bellamy's ''Looking Backward'' (1887) and H.G. Wells's ''The Time Machine'' (1895) were concerned with technological and biological developments. Industrialization, Charles Darwin, Darwin's theory of evolution and Marx's theory of social class, class divisions shaped these works and turned historical processes into a subject of wide debate. Bellamy's ''Looking Backward'' became the second best-selling book of the 19th century after Harriet Beecher Stowe's ''Uncle Tom's Cabin''. Such works led to the development of a whole genre of popular science fiction as the 20th century approached.

20th century

Modernism and post-modernism

James Joyce's ''Ulysses (novel), Ulysses'' (1922) had a major influence on modern novelists, in the way that it replaced the 18th- and 19th-century narrator with a text that attempted to record inner thoughts, or a "stream of consciousness (narrative mode), stream of consciousness". This term was first used by William James in 1890 and, along with the related term interior monologue, is used by modernists like Dorothy Richardson, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. Also in the 1920s expressionist Alfred Döblin went in a different direction with ''Berlin Alexanderplatz'' (1929), where interspersed non-fictional text fragments exist alongside the fictional material to create another new form of realism, which differs from that of stream-of-consciousness. Later works like Samuel Beckett's trilogy ''Molloy (novel), Molloy'' (1951), ''Malone Dies'' (1951) and ''The Unnamable (novel), The Unnamable'' (1953), as well as Julio Cortázar's ''Hopscotch (Julio Cortázar novel), Rayuela'' (1963) and Thomas Pynchon's ''Gravity's Rainbow'' (1973) all make use of the stream-of-consciousness technique. On the other hand, Robert Coover is an example of those authors who, in the 1960s, fragmented their stories and challenged time and sequentiality as fundamental structural concepts. Chinua Achebe - Buffalo 25Sep2008

The 20th century novel deals with a wide range of subject matter. Erich Maria Remarque's ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' (1928) focusses on a young German's experiences of World War I. The Jazz Age is explored by American F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the Great Depression by fellow American John Steinbeck. Totalitarianism is the subject of British writer George Orwell's most famous novels. Existentialism is the focus of two writers from France: Jean-Paul Sartre with ''Nausea (novel), Nausea'' (1938) and Albert Camus with ''The Stranger (Camus novel), The Stranger'' (1942). The counterculture of the 1960s, with its exploration of altered states of consciousness, led to revived interest in the mystical works of Hermann Hesse'', such as Steppenwolf (novel), Steppenwolf'' (1927), and produced iconic works of its own, for example Ken Kesey's ''One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (novel), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'' and Thomas Pynchon's ''Gravity's Rainbow''. Novelists have also been interested in the subject of racial and gender identity in recent decades. Jesse Kavadlo of Maryville University of St. Louis has described Chuck Palahniuk's ''Fight Club (novel), Fight Club'' (1996) as "a closeted Feminism, feminist critique". Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, Elfriede Jelinek were feminist voices during this period. Furthermore, the major political and military confrontations of the 20th and 21st centuries have also influenced novelists. The events of World War II, from a German perspective, are dealt with by Günter Grass' ''The Tin Drum'' (1959) and an American by Joseph Heller's ''Catch-22'' (1961). The subsequent Cold War influenced popular spy fiction, spy novels. Latin American self-awareness in the wake of the (failing) leftist revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s resulted in a "Latin American Boom", linked to the names of novelists Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez, along with the invention of a special brand of postmodern magic realism. Another major 20th-century social event, the so-called sexual revolution is reflected in the modern novel. D.H. Lawrence's ''Lady Chatterley's Lover'' had to be published in Italy in 1928 with British censorship only lifting its ban as late as 1960. Henry Miller's ''Tropic of Cancer (novel), Tropic of Cancer'' (1934) created a comparable US scandal. Transgressive fiction from Vladimir Nabokov's ''Lolita'' (1955) to Michel Houellebecq's ''Les Particules élémentaires'' (1998) pushed the boundaries, leading to the mainstream publication of explicitly erotic works such as Anne Desclos' ''Story of O'' (1954) and Anaïs Nin's ''Delta of Venus'' (1978). In the second half of the 20th century, postmodernism, Postmodern authors subverted serious debate with playfulness, claiming that art could never be original, that it always plays with existing materials. The idea that language is self-referential was already an accepted truth in the world of pulp magazine, pulp fiction. A postmodernist re-reads popular literature as an essential cultural production. Novels from Thomas Pynchon's ''The Crying of Lot 49'' (1966), to Umberto Eco's ''The Name of the Rose'' (1980) and ''Foucault's Pendulum'' (1989) made use of intertextuality, intertextual references.

Genre fiction

While the reader of so-called Classic book, serious literature will follow public discussions of novels, popular fiction production employs more direct and short-term marketing strategies by openly declaring a work's genre. Popular novels are based entirely on the expectations for the particular genre, and this includes the creation of a series of novels with an identifiable brand name. e.g. the Sherlock Holmes series by Arthur Conan Doyle. Popular literature holds a larger market share. Romance fiction had an estimated $1.375 billion share in the US book market in 2007. Inspirational literature/religious literature followed with $819 million, science fiction/Fantasy literature, fantasy with $700 million, Mystery fiction, mystery with $650 million and then classic literary fiction with $466 million. Dan Brown bookjacket cropped

Genre literature might be seen as the successor of the early modern chapbook. Both fields share a focus on readers who are in search of accessible reading satisfaction. The twentieth century love romance is a successor of the novels Madeleine de Scudéry, Madame de La Fayette, Marie de La Fayette, Aphra Behn, and Eliza Haywood wrote from the 1640s into the 1740s. The modern adventure novel goes back to Daniel Defoe's ''Robinson Crusoe'' (1719) and its immediate successors. Modern pornography has no precedent in the chapbook market but originates in libertine and hedonistic belles lettres, of works like John Cleland's ''Fanny Hill'' (1749) and similar eighteenth century novels. Ian Fleming's ''James Bond'' is a descendant of the anonymous yet extremely sophisticated and stylish narrator who mixed his love affairs with his political missions in ''La Guerre d'Espagne'' (1707). Marion Zimmer Bradley's ''The Mists of Avalon'' is influenced by Tolkien, as well as Arthurian literature, including its nineteenth century successors. Modern horror fiction also has no precedent on the market of chapbooks but goes back to the elitist market of early nineteenth century Romantic literature. Modern popular science fiction has an even shorter history, from the 1860s. The authors of popular fiction tend to advertise that they have exploited a controversial topic and this is a major difference between them and so-called elitist literature. Dan Brown, for example, discusses, on his website, the question whether his ''Da Vinci Code'' is an anti-Christian novel. And because authors of popular fiction have a fan community to serve, they can risk offending literary critics. However, the boundaries between popular and serious literature have blurred in recent years, with postmodernism and poststructuralism, as well as by adaptation of popular literary classics by the film and television industries.

Crime became a major subject of 20th and 21st century genre novelists and crime fiction reflects the realities of modern industrialized societies. Crime is both a personal and public subject: criminals each have their personal motivations; detectives, see their moral codes challenged. Patricia Highsmith's psychological thriller, thrillers became a medium of new psychological explorations. Paul Auster's ''The New York Trilogy, New York Trilogy'' (1985–1986) is an example of experimental postmodernist literature based on this genre. Fantasy is another major area of commercial fiction, and a major example is J. R. R. Tolkien's ''

'' (1954/55), a work originally written for young readers that became a major cultural artefact. Tolkien in fact revived the tradition of European epic (genre), epic literature in the tradition of Beowulf, the North Germanic Edda and the King Arthur, Arthurian Cycles. Science fiction is another important type of genre fiction and has developed in a variety of ways, ranging from the early, technological adventure Jules Verne had made fashionable in the 1860s, to Aldous Huxley's ''Brave New World'' (1932) about Western consumerism and technology. George Orwell's ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' (1949) deals with totalitarianism and surveillance, among other matters, while Stanisław Lem, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke produced modern classics which focus on the interaction between humans and machines. The surreal novels of Philip K Dick such as ''The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch'' explore the nature of reality, reflecting the widespread recreational experimentation with drugs and cold-war paranoia of the 60's and 70's. Writers such as Ursula le Guin and Margaret Atwood explore feminist and broader social issues in their works. William Gibson, author of the cult classic ''Neuromancer'' (1984), is one of a new wave of authors who explore post-apocalyptic fantasies and virtual reality.

21st century

Non-traditional formats

A major development in this century has been novels published as ebooks, and the growth of web fiction, which is available primarily or solely on the Internet. A common type is the web Serial (literature), serial: unlike most modern novels, web fiction novels are frequently published in parts over time. Ebooks are often published with a paper version. Audio books (a recording of a book reading) have also become common this century. Another non-traditional format, popular this century, is the

. However, though a graphic novel may be "a fictional story that is presented in comic-strip format and published as a book", it can also refers to non-fiction and collections of short works. While the term graphic novel was coined in the 1960s there were precursors in the 19th century. The author John Updike, when he spoke to the Bristol Literary Society in 1969, on "the death of the novel", declared that he saw "no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic strip novel masterpiece". A popular Japanese version of the graphic novel can be found in manga, and such works of fiction can be published Manga#Digital manga, in online versions. Audiobooks have been available since the 1930s in schools and public libraries, and to a lesser extent in music shops. Since the 1980s this medium has become more widely available, including more recently online. Web fiction is especially popular in China, with revenues topping US$2.5 billion, as well as in Web novels in South Korea, South Korea. Online literature such as web fiction inside China has over 500 million readers, therefore, online literature in China plays a much more important role than in the United States and the rest of the world. Most books are available online, where the most popular novels find millions of readers. Joara is S. Korea's largest web novel platform with 140,000 writers, with an average of 2,400 serials per day and 420,000 works. The company posted 12.5 billion won in sales in 2015 as profits were generated from 2009. Its membership is 1.1 million, and it uses 8.6 million cases a day on average (2016). Since Joara's users have almost the same gender ratio, both fantasy and romance forms of

are in high demand. The development of ebooks and web novels has led to a rapid expansion of self-published works in recent years. Authors who self-publish can make more money than through a traditional publisher. However, despite the challenges from digital media print remains "the most popular book format among U.S. consumers, with more than 60 percent of adults having read a print book in the last twelve months".

References

External links

''The novel 1780-1832''
at the British Library
''The novel 1832-1880''
at the British Library
''The House of the Seven Gables'' with "Preface"
* {{Authority control Fiction Fiction forms Prose Novels, Media formats Literary terminology