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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 classical 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...)

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A Wizard of Earthsea is a fantasy novel written by American author Ursula K. Le Guin and first published by the small press Parnassus in 1968. It is regarded as a classic of children's literature and of fantasy, within which it is widely influential. The story is set in the fictional archipelago of Earthsea and centers on a young mage named Ged, born in a village on the island of Gont. He displays great power while still a boy and joins a school of wizardry, where his prickly nature drives him into conflict with a fellow student. During a magical duel, Ged's spell goes awry and releases a shadow creature that attacks him. The novel follows Ged's journey as he seeks to be free of the creature.

The book has often been described as a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, as it explores Ged's process of learning to cope with power and come to terms with death. The novel also carries Taoist themes about a fundamental balance in the universe of Earthsea, which wizards are supposed to maintain, closely tied to the idea that language and names have power to affect the material world and alter this balance. The structure of the story is similar to that of a traditional epic, although critics have also described it as subverting this genre in many ways, such as by making the protagonist dark-skinned in contrast to more typical white-skinned heroes. (Full article...)

Selected novel quote

‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Wendy Moira Angela Darling,’ she replied with some satisfaction. ‘What is your name?’
‘Peter Pan.’
She was already sure that he must be Peter, but it did seem a comparatively short name.
‘Is that all?’
‘Yes,’ he said rather sharply. He felt for the first time that it was a shortish name.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Wendy Moira Angela.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Peter gulped.
She asked where he lived.
‘Second to the right,’ said Peter, ‘and then straight on till morning.’
‘What a funny address!’
Peter had a sinking feeling. For the first time he felt that perhaps it was a funny address.
“A moment after the fairy’s entrance the window was blow open by the breathing of the little stars, and Peter dropped in.”

Peter Pan

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Did you know...

...that Chinua Achebe's novel A Man of the People described a coup d'état so similar to the real circumstances of Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi's rise to power in Nigeria that Achebe was suspected of knowing about the coup in advance?
...that the 1923 children's novel King Matt the First is as popular in Poland as Peter Pan is in the English-speaking world?
...that the Finnish novel Puhdistus (Purge) by Sofi Oksanen has won awards in Finland and France but had mixed reviews in Estonia, where the story takes place?

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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 21719 newspaper reprint of Robinson Crusoe (from Novel)
Image 3"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 4The 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 5Madame de Pompadour spending her afternoon with a book (François Boucher, 1756) (from Novel)
Image 6A modern chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 7Statue of Ostap Bender in Elista (from Picaresque novel)
Image 8Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1741) (from Novel)
Image 9Intimate short stories: The Court and City Vagaries (1711). (from Novel)
Image 10J. K. Rowling, 2010 (from Novel)
Image 111915 novelization of the original 1904 play Peter and Wendy (from Novelization)
Image 12The picaresque genre began with the Spanish novel Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) (Pictured: Its title page) (from Picaresque novel)
Image 13A 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 14One 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 15Paper as the essential carrier: Murasaki Shikibu writing her The Tale of Genji in the early 11th century, 17th-century depiction (from Novel)
Image 16Harlequin novels (from Romance novel)
Image 17A light novel bookstore in Macau (from Light novel)
Image 18The chapbook Jack the Giant Killer (from Chapbook)
Image 19First edition of Aleksis Kivi's The Seven Brothers (1870) (from Novel)
Image 20Novelization of chapter 8 of the film series Les Vampires (1915–16) (from Novelization)
Image 21Image from a Victorian edition of Walter Scott's Waverley (1814) (from Novel)
Image 22Dan Brown (from Novel)
Image 23Richard Head, The English Rogue (1665) (from Novel)
Image 241474: 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 25Woodcut of a fairy-circle from a 17th-century chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 26Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) (from Novel)
Image 27King Kong (1932) novelization of King Kong (1933) (from Novelization)
Image 28Adventure novels and short stories were popular subjects for American pulp magazines. (from Adventure fiction)
Image 29Chaucer reciting Troilus and Criseyde: early-15th-century manuscript of the work at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (from Novel)
Image 30Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol.6, pp. 70–71 (1769) (from Novel)
Image 31Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladivostok, 1995 (from Novel)

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