Short answers, pulled from the story.
A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction usually written in prose and published as a book. The scholar Margaret Doody describes the novel as having a continuous history of about two thousand years, with origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, Medieval chivalric romance, and the Italian Renaissance novella.
The word novel derives from the Italian novella, meaning new, news, or a short story of something new. The novella itself comes from the Latin novellus, a diminutive of novus, which means new.
Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, is frequently cited as the first significant European novelist of the modern era. The first part of Don Quixote was published in 1605, and the work has been called the first great novel of world literature.
M. H. Abrams and Walter Scott argued that a novel shows a realistic depiction of the state of a society, such as Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. The romance, by contrast, encompasses any fictitious narrative that emphasizes marvellous or uncommon incidents, though works like Frankenstein and The Lord of the Rings are still commonly called novels.
Literary historian Ian Watt argued in The Rise of the Novel, published in 1957, that the modern novel was born in the early eighteenth century with Robinson Crusoe in 1719. He tied this to a rise in fictional realism that distinguished the novel from earlier prose narratives.
According to the English novelist E. M. Forster, a novel should be composed with at least fifty thousand words. The philosopher and literary critic Gyorgy Lukacs connected the requirement of length to the idea that a novel should encompass the totality of life.
Web fiction inside China has over 500 million readers, with revenues topping 2.5 billion US dollars, and Joara is South Korea's largest web novel platform with 140,000 writers. Despite digital growth, print remained the most popular book format among US consumers, with more than 60 percent of adults having read a print book in the twelve months before September 2021.