Novel

• 1. Introduction

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  A novel, according to the scholar Margaret Doody, has a history of about two thousand years. The word itself comes from the Italian novella, meaning new, or news, or a short story of something new, which traces back to the Latin novellus, a diminutive of novus. That deep root holds a puzzle. If the form is two millennia old, why do so many people insist it began with a single Spanish book, or in a single English decade? Behind the simple label of long fictional narrative lies a tangle of arguments about where prose fiction starts, what separates a novel from a romance, and how reading itself became a private act. The disputes reach from ancient Greek and Roman prose to eleventh-century Japan, from a satirized knight to a stream of consciousness, and from the printing press to web serials read by hundreds of millions. The questions that follow ask who gets credited, why the romance kept resurfacing, and what readers were really after when they opened a book alone.

• 2. The Naming Of A Form

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  M. H. Abrams and Walter Scott argued that a novel shows a realistic depiction of the state of a society, offering Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird as the kind of book they meant. The romance, by their distinction, covered any fictitious narrative that leaned on marvellous or uncommon incidents. The boundary was never clean. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings sit firmly in the marvellous, yet everyone calls them novels too.

  Some writers chose the older word on purpose. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, and John Cowper Powys preferred to call their work romance, a label that carried different expectations than the genre fiction romance novel built around romantic love. György Lukács tied the question of length to the idea that a novel should encompass the totality of life. E. M. Forster set a plainer floor, holding that a novel should run to at least fifty thousand words. These competing definitions left room for verse to claim the territory too, in works like Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, built from five hundred and ninety Onegin stanzas.

• 3. Older Than The West

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  Chariton's Callirhoe, written in the mid first century, has been called the earliest surviving Western novel. Around it stand Petronius' Satyricon, Lucian's True Story, Apuleius' The Golden Ass, and the anonymous Aesop Romance and Alexander Romance, classical Greek and Latin prose drawing on oral storytelling and myth. Their style was later adapted in Byzantine works such as Hysimine and Hysimines by Eustathios Makrembolites.

  In India between the fifth and eighth centuries, Classical Sanskrit produced its own narrative forms. Subandhu's Vasavadatta, Daṇḍin's Daśakumāracarita and Avantisundarīkathā, and Banabhatta's Kadambari grew from older Sanskrit plays, Indian classical drama, oral traditions, and religious texts. Harold Bloom looked even further east, describing Lady Murasaki's use of intimacy and irony in The Tale of Genji as having anticipated Cervantes as the first novelist. In China, Zhang Zhuo's seventh-century You Xian Ku has been counted among the earliest romances of the Tang dynasty. Urbanization and printed books in the Song dynasty, which ran from 960 to 1279, turned oral storytelling, chuanqi, and huaben into the long vernacular novels of the Ming.

• 4. Knights And Storytellers

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  Johannes Gutenberg's printing press, invented around 1439, did not immediately produce European novels. Long works stayed in poetry through the sixteenth century, and the form that dominated aristocratic circles was the chivalric romance, marvel-filled adventures of a knight-errant on a quest. What set it apart from the chanson de geste was its emphasis on heterosexual love and courtly manners. These tales were first written in Old French, Anglo-Norman, and Occitan, then in English, Italian, and German.

  The shift from verse to prose dates from the early thirteenth century, visible in the Romance of Flamenca and the Prose Lancelot, or Vulgate Cycle. That collection led indirectly to Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur of the early 1470s. Prose appealed because it let writers tie popular stories to serious histories and was easier to translate. The word novel, by contrast, grew from the novella, short stories that stayed part of European oral culture into the late nineteenth century. Boccaccio's The Decameron gathered one hundred novelle told by ten people, seven women and three men, who fled the Black Death from Florence to the Fiesole hills in 1348.

• 5. Lies, Histories, And Belles Lettres

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  William Caxton's 1485 edition of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur was sold as a true history, despite a plot full of magical incidents. Sir John Mandeville's Voyages, written in the fourteenth century but printed into the eighteenth, presented natural wonders as fact, including one-footed Ethiopians who used the single extremity as an umbrella against the desert sun. The modern split between history and fiction simply did not exist in the early sixteenth century, and both works were only later read as fiction.

  In the late seventeenth century, all books were still sold under the heading of History and politicks, mixing pamphlets, memoirs, travel writing, serious histories, romances, and novels in one market. Authors exploited the confusion deliberately. The quasi-historical romances of Madame d'Aulnoy, César Vichard de Saint-Réal, Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras, and Anne-Marguerite Petit du Noyer let writers publish risky histories while claiming, if accused of libel, that they had only written fiction. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe fit this game oddly. Its preface insisted it be read as a true private history, neither romance nor novel, even as Defoe later attacked anyone who called the names borrowed and the story feigned.

• 6. Who Founded The Modern Novel

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  Miguel de Cervantes, whose Don Quixote appeared in its first part in 1605, is frequently cited as the first significant European novelist of the modern era, and the book has been called the first great novel of world literature. Yet the founding date is contested at every turn. Some trace the modern European novel to Rabelais and Pantagruel in 1532. Honore d'Urfe's pastoral L'Astrée, published in 1610, has been called the earliest French novel.

  Literary historian Ian Watt placed the birth elsewhere. In The Rise of the Novel, published in 1957, he argued that a rise in fictional realism during the eighteenth century distinguished the novel from earlier prose, and tied its modern beginning to Robinson Crusoe in 1719. Even among English critics the anchor moves, with some dating the English novel to Samuel Richardson's Pamela rather than Crusoe. The French had their own milestones, running from Scarron's Roman Comique through Madame de La Fayette's Zayde of 1670 to her Princesse de Clèves of 1678, the first novel with what became characteristic French subject matter. Aphra Behn's Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, published across 1684 to 1687, gave the epistolary form its first full scandalous example.

• 7. The Romance Refuses To Die

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  Fénelon's Telemachus, published in 1699 and 1700, traded on nostalgia for the old romances with their heroism and professed virtue, just as the word novel seemed to be winning. Jane Barker advertised her Exilius in 1715 as a new romance written after the manner of Telemachus. The rise of novel at the expense of romance stayed a mainly Spanish and English phenomenon, since only those two literatures had openly discredited the older form.

  Horace Walpole reopened the door in 1764 with The Castle of Otranto, subtitled A Gothic Story, followed by Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho in 1794 and Matthew Lewis's The Monk in 1796. These gothic works challenged the claim that a novel must depict life realistically, and psychological readers in the early nineteenth century treated them as encounters with sexuality, anxieties, and insatiable desires. Walter Scott's Waverley, published in 1814, broke from earlier historical romance by inventing the true historical novel, using documentary sources like a historian while giving his subject a deeper imaginative weight. He had collaborated with Lewis on Tales of Wonder in 1801, and became the most famous novelist of his generation across Europe.

• 8. Inner Voices And New Screens

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  James Joyce's Ulysses, published in 1922, reshaped the modern novel by replacing the older narrator with a text that recorded inner thoughts, a stream of consciousness. William James had coined that term in 1890, and it traveled through Dorothy Richardson, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. Alfred Döblin took realism elsewhere in Berlin Alexanderplatz of 1929, splicing non-fictional fragments alongside the fiction. Postmodern writers later treated art as something that always plays with existing materials, threading intertextual references through Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose of 1980.

  Genre fiction carried the largest market share, with romance fiction estimated at 1.375 billion dollars of the US book market in 2007, ahead of inspirational, science fiction and fantasy, mystery, and classic literary fiction at 466 million dollars. The newest shift is digital. Web fiction inside China draws over 500 million readers with revenues topping 2.5 billion dollars, and South Korea's largest web novel platform Joara hosts 140,000 writers. Yet print held its ground. As of September 2021, more than 60 percent of US adults had read a print book in the previous twelve months.