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A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction usually written in prose and published as a book. The English word to describe such a work derives from the Italian: novella for "new", "news", or "short story (of something new)", itself from the Latin: novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of novellus, diminutive of novus, meaning "new". According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, Medieval Chivalric romance, and in the tradition of the Italian Renaissance novella. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, in the historical romances of Walter Scott and the Gothic novel.

Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, and John Cowper Powys, preferred the term "romance". M. H. Abrams and Walter Scott have argued that a novel is a fiction narrative that displays a realistic depiction of the state of a society, 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 Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Such "romances" should not be confused with the genre fiction romance novel, which focuses on romantic love.

Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji, an early 11th-century Japanese text, has sometimes been described as the world's first novel, because of its early use of the experience of intimacy in a narrative form. There is considerable debate over this, however, as there were certainly long fictional prose works that preceded it. The spread of printed books in China led to the appearance of classical Chinese novels during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), and Qing dynasty (1616-1911). An early example from Europe was Hayy ibn Yaqdhan by the Sufi writer Ibn Tufayl in Muslim Spain. Later developments occurred after the invention of the printing press. Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote (the first part of which was published in 1605), is frequently cited as the first significant European novelist of the modern era. Literary historian Ian Watt, in The Rise of the Novel (1957), argued that the modern novel was born in the early 18th century. (Full article...)

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The Sun Also Rises is the first novel by American writer Ernest Hemingway. It portrays American and British expatriates who travel along the Camino de Santiago from Paris to the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona and watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. An early modernist novel, it received mixed reviews upon publication. Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes that it is now "recognized as Hemingway's greatest work" and Hemingway scholar Linda Wagner-Martin calls it his most important novel. The novel was published in the United States in October 1926 by Scribner's. A year later, Jonathan Cape published the novel in London under the title Fiesta. It remains in print.

The novel is a roman à clef: the characters are based on people in Hemingway's circle and the action is based on events, particularly Hemingway's life in Paris in the 1920s and a trip to Spain in 1925 for the Pamplona festival and fishing in the Pyrenees. Hemingway converted to Catholicism as he wrote the novel, and Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera notes that protagonist Jake Barnes, a Catholic, was "a vehicle for Hemingway to rehearse his own conversion, testing the emotions that would accompany one of the most important acts of his life." Hemingway presents his notion that the "Lost Generation"—considered to have been decadent, dissolute and irretrievably damaged by World War I—was in fact resilient and strong. Hemingway investigates the themes of love and death, the revivifying power of nature and the concept of masculinity. His spare writing style, combined with his restrained use of description to convey characterizations and action, demonstrates his "Iceberg Theory" of writing. (Full article...)

Selected novel quote

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

Peter Pan

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Did you know...

...that The Vampyre (pictured) was a short novel first published on April 1, 1819 in parts in the New Monthly Magazine with the false attribution "A Tale by Lord Byron"?
...that Prathapa Mudaliar Charithram was the first novel in Tamil?
...that Sara Gruen’s historical novel Water for Elephants recounts that circus workers were sometimes thrown off the circus train in the middle of the night, a practice known as "redlighting"?

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General images

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

Image 1"Oh Edward! How can you?", a late-19th-century illustration from Sense and Sensibility (1811) by Jane Austen, a pioneer of the genre (from Romance novel)
Image 2Novelization of chapter 8 of the film series Les Vampires (1915–16). (from Novelization)
Image 3First edition of Aleksis Kivi's The Seven Brothers (1870) (from Novel)
Image 41719 newspaper reprint of Robinson Crusoe (from Novel)
Image 5One of the first and most influential pre-modern picaresque novels was The Golden Ass by Apuleius, which he published sometime in the 2nd century CE. (ms. Vat. Lat. 2194, Vatican Library) (1345 illustration). (from Picaresque novel)
Image 6Image from a Victorian edition of Walter Scott's Waverley (1814) (from Novel)
Image 7J. K. Rowling, 2010 (from Novel)
Image 8Chapbook frontispiece of Voltaire's The Extraordinary Tragical Fate of Calas, showing Jean Calas being tortured on a breaking wheel, late 18th century (from Chapbook)
Image 9Madame de Pompadour spending her afternoon with a book (François Boucher, 1756) (from Novel)
Image 10King Kong (1932) novelization of King Kong (1933) (from Novelization)
Image 11Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol.6, pp. 70–71 (1769) (from Novel)
Image 12Dan Brown (from Novel)
Image 13Harlequin novels (from Romance novel)
Image 14Chinua Achebe, Buffalo, 2008 (from Novel)
Image 15Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladivostok, 1995 (from Novel)
Image 16Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) (from Novel)
Image 17Intimate short stories: The Court and City Vagaries (1711). (from Novel)
Image 18Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1741) (from Novel)
Image 19Paper as the essential carrier: Murasaki Shikibu writing her The Tale of Genji in the early 11th century, 17th-century depiction (from Novel)
Image 20A light novel bookstore in Macau (from Light novel)
Image 21A nineteenth-century painting by the Swiss-French painter Marc Gabriel Charles Gleyre depicting a scene from Longus's Daphnis and Chloe (from Romance novel)
Image 22Richard Head, The English Rogue (1665) (from Novel)
Image 23Woodcut of a fairy-circle from a 17th-century chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 241474: The customer in the copyist's shop with a book he wants to have copied. This illustration of the first printed German Melusine looked back to the market of manuscripts. (from Novel)
Image 25A modern-day chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 26Adventure novels and short stories were popular subjects for American pulp magazines. (from Adventure fiction)
Image 27The modern picaresque began with the Spanish novel Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) (title page) (from Picaresque novel)
Image 281915 novelization of the original 1904 play Peter and Wendy. (from Novelization)
Image 29The chapbook Jack the Giant Killer (from Chapbook)
Image 30Chaucer reciting Troilus and Criseyde: early-15th-century manuscript of the work at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (from Novel)
Image 31Statue of Ostap Bender in Elista (from Picaresque novel)

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