And it is possible to descry a tendency to triviality in the form itself. It is to be noted that, despite the high example of novelists of the most profound seriousness, such as Tolstoy, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf, the term novel still, in some quarters, carries overtones of lightness and frivolity. The stories are little new things, novelties, freshly minted diversions, toys they are not reworkings of known fables or myths, and they are lacking in weight and moral earnestness. The novella was a kind of enlarged anecdote like those to be found in the 14th-century Italian classic Boccaccio’s Decameron, each of which exemplifies the etymology well enough. The term novel is a truncation of the Italian word novella (from the plural of Latin novellus, a late variant of novus, meaning “new”), so that what is now, in most languages, a diminutive denotes historically the parent form. Length is very much one of the dimensions of the genre. But this state admits of its own quantitative categories, so that a relatively brief novel may be termed a novella (or, if the insubstantiality of the content matches its brevity, a novelette), and a very long novel may overflow the banks of a single volume and become a roman-fleuve, or river novel. When any piece of fiction is long enough to constitute a whole book, as opposed to a mere part of a book, then it may be said to have achieved novelhood. The various forms that fiction may take are best seen less as a number of separate categories than as a continuum or, more accurately, a cline, with some such brief form as the anecdote at one end of the scale and the longest conceivable novel at the other. The novel is a genre of fiction, and fiction may be defined as the art or craft of contriving, through the written word, representations of human life that instruct or divert or both. Within its broad framework, the genre of the novel has encompassed an extensive range of types and styles: picaresque, epistolary, Gothic, romantic, realist, historical-to name only some of the more important ones. Novel, an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals imaginatively with human experience, usually through a connected sequence of events involving a group of persons in a specific setting. SpaceNext50 Britannica presents SpaceNext50, From the race to the Moon to space stewardship, we explore a wide range of subjects that feed our curiosity about space!Įxplore essential elements of the novel with Clifton Fadiman and actors See all videos for this article.
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