Portal:Novels

Portal topics: Activities; Culture; Geography; Health; History; Mathematics; Nature; People; Philosophy; Religion; Society; Technology; Random portal

The Novels Portal

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.

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.

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...)

Refresh with new selections below (purge)

Featured article - show another

This is a featured article, which represents some of the best content on English Wikipedia..

The Well of Loneliness is a 1928 lesbian novel by the British author Radclyffe Hall. It follows the life of Stephen Gordon, an Englishwoman from an upper-class family whose "sexual inversion" (homosexuality) is apparent from an early age. She finds love with Mary Llewellyn, whom she meets while serving as an ambulance driver in World War I, but their happiness together is marred by social isolation and rejection, which Hall depicts as having a debilitating effect on inverts. The novel portrays inversion as a natural, God-given state and makes an explicit plea: "Give us also the right to our existence". The novel became the target of a campaign by James Douglas, editor of the Sunday Express newspaper, who wrote "I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel." Although its only sexual reference consists of the words "and that night, they were not divided", a British court judged it obscene because it defended "unnatural practices between women". In the United States the book survived legal challenges in New York state and in Customs Court.

More selected articles

More...

Selected novel quote

Religion is a solace to many people and it is even conceivable that some religion, somewhere, really is Ultimate Truth. But in many cases, being religious is merely a form of conceit. The Bible Belt faith in which I was brought up encouraged me to think that I was better than the rest of the world; I was 'saved' and they were 'damned' — we were in a state of grace and the rest of the world were 'heathens' and by 'heathen' they meant such people as our brother Mahmoud. It meant that an ignorant, stupid lout who seldom bathed and planted his corn by the phase of the Moon could claim to know the final answers of the Universe. That entitled him to look down his nose at everybody else. Our hymn book was loaded with such arrogance — mindless, conceited, self-congratulation on how cozy we were with the Almighty and what a high opinion he had of us and us alone, and what hell everybody else was going to catch come Judgment Day.

Stranger in a Strange Land

More selected quotes

Did you know...

...that Edgar Allan Poe satirized the concept of a self-made man in his story "The Business Man" using a character that makes his fortune cutting the tails off cats?
...that a description of the Battle of Aspern-Essling written by Patrick Rambaud as The Battle was originally a project of Honoré de Balzac?
...that the Iceberg Theory refers to Ernest Hemingway's (pictured) distinctive writing style?

More Did you know facts

More...

General images

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

Image 1Dan Brown (from Novel)
Image 2Image from a Victorian edition of Walter Scott's Waverley (1814) (from Novel)
Image 3Harlequin novels (from Romance novel)
Image 4Paper as the essential carrier: Murasaki Shikibu writing her The Tale of Genji in the early 11th century, 17th-century depiction (from Novel)
Image 5A modern chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 6Adventure novels and short stories were popular subjects for American pulp magazines. (from Adventure fiction)
Image 71915 novelization of the original 1904 play Peter and Wendy (from Novelization)
Image 8Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol.6, pp. 70–71 (1769) (from Novel)
Image 9Statue of Ostap Bender in Elista (from Picaresque novel)
Image 10Richard Head, The English Rogue (1665) (from Novel)
Image 11Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) (from Novel)
Image 12Novelization of chapter 8 of the film series Les Vampires (1915–16) (from Novelization)
Image 13Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladivostok, 1995 (from Novel)
Image 14The picaresque genre began with the Spanish novel Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) (Pictured: Its title page) (from Picaresque novel)
Image 15J. K. Rowling, 2010 (from Novel)
Image 16First edition of Aleksis Kivi's The Seven Brothers (1870) (from Novel)
Image 17Woodcut of a fairy-circle from a 17th-century chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 18"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 19King Kong (1932) novelization of King Kong (1933) (from Novelization)
Image 20A light novel bookstore in Macau (from Light novel)
Image 21The chapbook Jack the Giant Killer (from Chapbook)
Image 22The 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 23Intimate short stories: The Court and City Vagaries (1711). (from Novel)
Image 24A 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 25Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1741) (from Novel)
Image 26Chaucer reciting Troilus and Criseyde: early-15th-century manuscript of the work at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (from Novel)
Image 27One 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 281719 newspaper reprint of Robinson Crusoe (from Novel)
Image 291474: 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 30Madame de Pompadour spending her afternoon with a book (François Boucher, 1756) (from Novel)
Image 31Chinua Achebe, Buffalo, 2008 (from Novel)

Subcategories

Novel categories

Featured content

This is a list of recognized content, updated weekly by JL-Bot (talk · contribs) (typically on Saturdays). There is no need to edit the list yourself. If an article is missing from the list, make sure it is tagged (e.g. {{WikiProject Novels}}) or categorized correctly and wait for the next update. See WP:RECOG for configuration options.