Portal:Novels

Portal topics: Activities; Culture; Geography; Health; History; Mathematics; Nature; People; Philosophy; Religion; Society; Technology; Random portal

The Novels Portal

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". Such "romances" should not be confused with the genre fiction romance novel, which focuses on romantic love. M. H. Abrams and Walter Scott have argued that a novel is a fiction narrative that displays a realistic depiction of the state of a society, 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.

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 the vernacular classic Chinese novels during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), and Qing dynasty (1616–1911). An early example from Europe was Hayy ibn Yaqdhan by the Sufi writer Ibn Tufayl in Muslim Spain. 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.

Recent technological developments have led to many novels also being published in non-print media: this includes audio books, web novels, and ebooks. Another non-traditional fiction format can be found in graphic novels. While these comic book versions of works of fiction have their origins in the 19th century, they have only become popular recently. (Full article...)

Refresh with new selections below (purge)

Featured article - show another

This is a featured article, which represents some of the best content on English Wikipedia..

Original dust jacket

Lad: A Dog is a 1919 American novel written by Albert Payson Terhune and published by E. P. Dutton. Composed of twelve short stories first published in magazines, the novel is based on the life of Terhune's real-life Rough Collie, Lad. Born in 1902, the real-life Lad was an unregistered collie of unknown lineage originally owned by Terhune's father. Lad's death in 1918 was mourned by many of the story's fans, particularly children.

Through the stories of Lad's adventures, Terhune expresses his views on parenting, obtaining perfect obedience without force and the nature and rights of the "well-bred". Terhune began writing the stories in 1915 at the suggestion of his Red Book Magazine editor. They gained in popularity and, as Terhune was under contractual obligation to submit something to Doubleday-Page, he collected them into novel form. After Doubleday rejected the novel, he solicited other publishers until it was picked up by Dutton. After a slow start, the novel became a best seller in the adult fiction and children's fiction markets, having been repositioned as a young adult novel by Grosset and Dunlap in the 1960s and 1970s. Selling over one million copies, it is Terhune's best-selling work and the one that propelled him to fame. It has been reprinted over 70 times by Dutton and republished by a variety of publishers since its original release, including at least six international translations. (Full article...)

Selected novel quote

"The Scarlet Pimpernel?" said Suzanne, with a merry laugh. "Why! what a droll name! What is the Scarlet Pimpernel, Monsieur?"
She looked at Sir Andrew with eager curiosity. The young man's face had become almost transfigured. His eyes shone with enthusiasm; hero-worship, love, admiration for his leader seemed literally to glow upon his face. "The Scarlet Pimpernel, Mademoiselle," he said at last "is the name of a humble English wayside flower; but it is also the name chosen to hide the identity of the best and bravest man in all the world, so that he may better succeed in accomplishing the noble task he has set himself to do."
"Ah, yes," here interposed the young Vicomte, "I have heard speak of this Scarlet Pimpernel. A little flower — red? — yes! They say in Paris that every time a royalist escapes to England that devil, Foucquier-Tinville, the Public Prosecutor, receives a paper with that little flower designated in red upon it.

The Scarlet Pimpernel

More selected quotes

Did you know...

...that Maya Angelou wrote one of her characters in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings to demonstrate how she survived her childhood as a black in a white-dominated world?
...that the novel Uncle Daddy by Ralph Fletcher (pictured) was awarded a 2002 Christopher Medal in the books for ages 10–12 category?
...that the only Rod Serling short story in the 2009 Twilight Zone anthology was called the least Twilight Zone-like story in the collection?

More Did you know facts

More...

General images

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

Image 1Statue of Ostap Bender in Elista (from Picaresque novel)
Image 2Madame de Pompadour spending her afternoon with a book (François Boucher, 1756) (from Novel)
Image 3A modern chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 4Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladivostok, 1995 (from Novel)
Image 5The chapbook Jack the Giant Killer (from Chapbook)
Image 6"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 7Paper as the essential carrier: Murasaki Shikibu writing her The Tale of Genji in the early 11th century, 17th-century depiction (from Novel)
Image 8A 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 9The frontispiece of a late 18th-century chapbook edition of Voltaire's The Extraordinary Tragical Fate of Calas, depicting Jean Calas being broken on the wheel (from Chapbook)
Image 101474: 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 11Intimate short stories: The Court and City Vagaries (1711). (from Novel)
Image 12Adventure novels and short stories were popular subjects for American pulp magazines. (from Adventure fiction)
Image 13Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol.6, pp. 70–71 (1769) (from Novel)
Image 14Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1741) (from Novel)
Image 151719 newspaper reprint of Robinson Crusoe (from Novel)
Image 16Chinua Achebe, Buffalo, 2008 (from Novel)
Image 17Dan Brown (from Novel)
Image 18A light novel bookstore in Macau (from Light novel)
Image 19Image from a Victorian edition of Walter Scott's Waverley (1814) (from Novel)
Image 20Harlequin novels (from Romance novel)
Image 21One of the most influential novels on the picaresque genre was The Golden Ass by Apuleius, which he published sometime in the 2nd century AD. (ms. Vat. Lat. 2194, Vatican Library) (1345 illustration). (from Picaresque novel)
Image 22Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) (from Novel)
Image 23Woodcut of a fairy-circle from a 17th-century chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 24Novelization of chapter 8 of the film series Les Vampires (1915–16) (from Novelization)
Image 251915 novelization of the original 1904 play Peter and Wendy (from Novelization)
Image 26J. K. Rowling, 2010 (from Novel)
Image 27First edition of Aleksis Kivi's The Seven Brothers (1870) (from Novel)
Image 28The picaresque genre began with the Spanish novel Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) (Pictured: Its title page) (from Picaresque novel)
Image 29Richard Head, The English Rogue (1665) (from Novel)
Image 30King Kong (1932) novelization of King Kong (1933) (from Novelization)
Image 31Chaucer reciting Troilus and Criseyde: early-15th-century manuscript of the work at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (from Novel)

Subcategories

Novel categories

Featured content

This is a list of recognized content, updated weekly by JL-Bot (talk · contribs) (typically on Saturdays). There is no need to edit the list yourself. If an article is missing from the list, make sure it is tagged (e.g. {{WikiProject Novels}}) or categorized correctly and wait for the next update. See WP:RECOG for configuration options.