Portal:Novels

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A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction usually written in prose and published as a book. The word 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 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, like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. The romance, on the other hand, encompasses any fictitious narrative that emphasizes marvellous or uncommon incidents. In reality, such works are nevertheless also commonly called novels, including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

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 with Robinson Crusoe.

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...)

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Pattern Recognition is a novel by science fiction writer William Gibson (pictured) published in 2003. Set in August and September 2002, the story follows Cayce Pollard, a 32-year-old marketing consultant who has a psychological sensitivity to corporate symbols. The action takes place in London, Tokyo, and Moscow as Cayce judges the effectiveness of a proposed corporate symbol and is hired to seek the creators of film clips anonymously posted to the internet. The novel's central theme involves the examination of the human desire to detect patterns or meaning and the risks of finding patterns in meaningless data. Other themes include methods of interpretation of history, cultural familiarity with brand names, and tensions between art and commercialization. The September 11, 2001, attacks are used as a motif representing the transition to the new century. Critics identify influences in Pattern Recognition from Thomas Pynchon's postmodernist detective story The Crying of Lot 49. The novel is Gibson's eighth and the first to be set in the contemporary world. Like his previous work, it has been classified as a science fiction and postmodern novel, with the action unfolding along a thriller plot line. Critics approved of the writing but found the plot unoriginal and some of the language distracting. The book peaked at No. 4 on the New York Times Best Seller list, was nominated for the 2003 British Science Fiction Association Award, and was shortlisted for the 2004 Arthur C. Clarke Award and Locus Awards.

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In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat.In the past, also, war was one of the main instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality. All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers, but they could not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency. So long as defeat meant the loss of independence, or some other result generally held to be undesirable, the precautions against defeat had to be serious. Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four. Inefficient nations were always conquered sooner or later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to illusions. Moreover, to be efficient it was necessary to be able to learn from the past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of what had happened in the past. Newspapers and history books were, of course, always coloured and biased, but falsification of the kind that is practiced today would have been impossible. War was a sure safeguard of sanity, and so far as the ruling classes were concerned it was probably the most important of all safeguards. While wars could be won or lost, no ruling class could be completely irresponsible.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

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...that Alistair Beaton predicted the flooding of New Orleans in his 2004 satirical novel A Planet for the President?
...that Burning Bright by John Steinbeck (pictured) was an attempt at a new form of literature, the "play-novelette"— but both the play and novel were savaged by the critics and Steinbeck never wrote for the theatre again?
...that The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five, a science fiction novel by Doris Lessing, was adapted for the opera in 1997 by Philip Glass?

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General images

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

Image 1Chinua Achebe, Buffalo, 2008 (from Novel)
Image 2One 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 3A 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 4Richard Head, The English Rogue (1665) (from Novel)
Image 5Chaucer reciting Troilus and Criseyde: early-15th-century manuscript of the work at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (from Novel)
Image 6King Kong (1932) novelization of King Kong (1933). The novel was based on the screenplay and was marketing for the film which was released two months later. (from Novelization)
Image 7Intimate short stories: The Court and City Vagaries (1711). (from Novel)
Image 8Madame de Pompadour spending her afternoon with a book (François Boucher, 1756) (from Novel)
Image 9The picaresque genre began with the Spanish novel Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) (Pictured: Its title page) (from Picaresque novel)
Image 10"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 11Dan Brown (from Novel)
Image 12Harlequin novels (from Romance novel)
Image 13Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1741) (from Novel)
Image 14First edition of Aleksis Kivi's The Seven Brothers (1870) (from Novel)
Image 15Novelization of chapter 8 of the film series Les Vampires (1915–16) (from Novelization)
Image 16Image from a Victorian edition of Walter Scott's Waverley (1814) (from Novel)
Image 17The 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 181915 novelization of the original 1904 play Peter and Wendy (from Novelization)
Image 19J. K. Rowling, 2010 (from Novel)
Image 20A modern chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 21Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) (from Novel)
Image 22Chapbook (c. 1800) of Jack the Giant Killer (from Chapbook)
Image 23Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol.6, pp. 70–71 (1769) (from Novel)
Image 241719 newspaper reprint of Robinson Crusoe (from Novel)
Image 25Paper as the essential carrier: Murasaki Shikibu writing her The Tale of Genji in the early 11th century, 17th-century depiction (from Novel)
Image 26A light novel bookstore in Macau (from Light novel)
Image 271474: 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 28Woodcut of a fairy-circle from a 17th-century chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 29Paranormal Novels: The Twilight Saga (from Romance novel)
Image 30Adventure novels and short stories were popular subjects for American pulp magazines. (from Adventure fiction)
Image 31Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladivostok, 1995 (from Novel)

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