vel is a long narrative, normally in prose, which describes fictionalcharacters and events, usually in

the form of a sequential story.

While Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel (1957) suggests that the novel came into being in the early
18th century, the genre has also been described as "a continuous and comprehensive history of
about two thousand years",[1] with historical roots in Classical Greece and Rome,medieval,
early modern romance, and in the tradition of the novella. The latter, an Italian word used to
describe short stories, supplied the present generic English term in the 18th century. Miguel de
Cervantes, author ofDon Quixote, is frequently cited as the first significant European novelistof
the modern era; the first part of Don Quixote was published in 1605.[2]
While a more precise definition of the genre is difficult, the main elements that critics discuss are:
how the narrative, and especially the plot, is constructed; the themes, settings, and characterization;
how language is used; and the way that plot, character, and setting relate toreality.
The romance is a related long prose narrative. Walter Scott defined it as "a fictitious narrative in
prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents", whereas in
the novel "the events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human events and the modern state
of society".[3] However, many romances, including thehistorical romances of Scott,[4] Emily
Bront's Wuthering Heights[5] and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick,[6] are also frequently called novels,
and Scott describes romance as a "kindred term". Romance, as defined here, should not be
confused with the genre fiction love romance or romance novel. Other European languages do not
distinguish between romance and novel: "a novel is le roman, der Roman, il romanzo."[7]
Contents
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1 Defining the genre

o

1.1 A fictional narrative

1.2 Literary prose

1.3 Media: paper and print

1.4 Content: intimate experience

1.5 Length

2 Early forerunners

3 Medieval period 11001500

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3.1 Romances

3.2 The novella

4 Renaissance period: 1500-1700

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4.1 Chapbooks

4.2 Romances

4.2.1 Heroic romances

4.2.2 Satirical romances

4.3 Dubious and scandalous histories

4.4 Cervantes and the rise of the novel in the 17th century

5 The rise of the novel in England: 1700-1770

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5.1 Changing cultural status

5.2 Realism and art

5.3 Novel and romance

5.4 The acceptance of the novel as literature

5.5 The reformation of manners

5.6 Philosophical novels

6 Romanticism: 17701837

7 The Victorian period: 1837-1901

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7.1 Literary realism

7.2 The creation of national literatures

7.3 The modern individual

8 The 20th century and later

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8.1 Global market place

8.2 Modernism and post-modernism

8.3 Writing world history

8.4 Popular fiction

9 See also
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9.1 Genres of the novel

9.2 Literature

9.3 Novels-related articles

10 Notes

11 References

12 Further reading
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12.1 17th- and 18th-century views

12.2 Secondary literature

Defining the genre[edit]

Madame de Pompadourspending her afternoon with a book, 1756 religious and scientific reading has a
different iconography.

A novel is a long, fictional narrative which describes intimate human experiences. The novel in
the modern era usually makes use of a literary prose style, and the development of the prose novel
at this time was encouraged by innovations inprinting, and the introduction of cheap paper, in the
15th century.
The present English (and Spanish) word for a long work of prose fiction derives from
the Italian novella for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from theLatin novella, a
singular noun use of the neuter plural of novellus, diminutive of novus, meaning "new".[note 1] Most
European languages have preserved the term "romance" (as in French, Dutch, Russian, Serbo-

Croatian, Romanian, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian "roman"; German "Roman"; Portuguese
"romance" and Italian "romanzo") for extended narratives.

A fictional narrative[edit]
Fictionality is most commonly cited as distinguishing novels from historiography. However this can
be a problematic criterion. Throughout the early modern periodauthors 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.
However, up until the 1750s historians were the main critics of the novel and they emphasised its
lack of veracity and therefore serious worth, and criticised it for being merely entertainment. Then in
the second half of the 18th-century criticism evolved and with Romanticism came the idea that works
of fiction could be art.

Literary prose[edit]
While prose rather than verse became the standard of the modern novel, the ancestors of the
modern European novel include verse epics in the Romance language of southern France,
especially those by Chrtien de Troyes (late 12th century), and in Middle English (Geoffrey
Chaucer's (c. 1343 1400) The Canterbury Tales).[8] Even in the 19th century, fictional narratives in
verse, such as Lord Byron's Don Juan (1824), Alexander Pushkin's Yevgeniy Onegin(1833),
and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856), competed with prose novels. Vikram
Seth's The Golden Gate (1986), composed of 590 Onegin stanzas, is a more recent example of the
verse novel.[9]
However, in the 15th century, following the invention of printing, prose began to dominate European
fiction. This immediately led to the development of a special elevated prose style modelled on Greek
and Roman histories, and the traditions of verse narrative. The development of a distinct fictional
language was crucial for the genre that aimed at creating works that readers would actually identify,
and appreciate, as fiction rather than history.
At the beginning of the 16th century, printing had created a special demand for books that were
neither simply published for the nonacademic audience nor explicitly scientific literature, but belleslettres. This included modern history and science in the vernacular, personal memoirs, contemporary
political scandal, fiction and poetry. However, prose fiction was soon far more popular than
verse, rhetoric and science. Fictional prose, though aiming for stylistic elegance, was closer to
everyday language, to personal letters, to the art of "gallant" conversation, and to the personal
memoir and travelogue. Pierre Daniel Huet summarised the stylistic ambition of fictional prose
accordingly in 1670: "It must be compos'd with Art and Elegance, lest it should appear to be a rude
undigested Mass, without Order or Beauty."[10]

By the 18th century, however, English authors began to criticize the French ideals of belles
lettres elegance, and a less aristocratic prose style became the ideal for them in the 1740s. When, in
the 1760s, it became the norm for the author to open his or her novel with a statement of the work's
fictionality, the prose became even more informal.

Media: paper and print[edit]

The development of printing technology, along with the availability of paper, changed the situation for
prose fiction. Paper allowed the production of cheap books that would not necessarily be read twice,
and which could be bought exclusively for private diversion. The new medium produced the modern
novel in Europe in the course of the 15th and 16th centuries. The formats duodecimo and octavo, or