Novel

Based on Wikipedia: Novel

For almost two thousand years, human beings have been telling long stories. Weaving worlds out of words, building bridges between lives lived and imagined. The novel—that most flexible and elusive form of narrative fiction—has not always existed as we know it. In fact, the very word "novel" carries within its etymology a reminder of something new: from the Italian novella, meaning "new," "news," or "short story of something new," derived from the Latin novellus, diminutive of novus—meaning "new."

This should give us pause. Every time we open a novel, we hold in our hands something that, at its core, represents a declaration of freshness. A departure from what came before. Margaret Doody has described the novel as having "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years," and that history is marked by reinvention.

The Ancient Roots

The novel's lineage stretches back further than many readers realize. Its origins lie in the ancient Greek and Roman novel—stories told in a time when storytelling itself was being transformed by new ideas about what fiction could accomplish. Before the novel became the form we recognize today, it drew from the Medieval chivalric romance, with its tales of heroes and quests, and from the tradition of the Italian Renaissance novella, which helped plant seeds for what would eventually bloom into something entirely new.

The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism in the nineteenth century, finding new life in the historical romances of Walter Scott and the Gothic novel that so frightened and delighted readers. Some writers—including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, and John Cowper Powys—preferred to call their works "romances," a term that carried different connotations than it does today.

This matters because we often forget how elastic the boundaries of fiction truly are. 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—think of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, with its unflinching portrait of the American South during the civil rights era. The romance, on the other hand, encompasses any fictitious narrative that emphasizes marvellous or uncommon incidents. Yet in practice, such works are also commonly called novels: Mary Shellea's Frankenstein and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings both bear this dual identity.

"In reality, such works are nevertheless also commonly called novels"

This distinction matters less than we might think. What counts as a novel has never been fixed by rigid rules—different cultures have different expectations, different traditions, different definitions of what constitutes "fiction" versus "history."

The Birth of the Modern Novel

The spread of printed books in China led to the appearance of 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—a remarkable work that predates what we typically consider the European novel by centuries.

But 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. His work fundamentally changed how Europeans thought about storytelling—suddenly, a fictional narrative could be serious, philosophical, and profound rather than merely entertaining.

Literarian Ian Watt, in The Rise of the Novel (1957), argued that the modern novel was born in the early eighteenth century with Robinson Crusoe—that iconic tale of survival on an island which became the first great English novel. Daniel Defoe's work showed what could happen when a writer decided to make the ordinary, the everyday, the subject of sustained narrative attention.

"The modern novel was born in the early 18th century with Robinson Crusoe"

The development of the prose novel at this time was encouraged by innovations in printing and the introduction of cheap paper in the fifteenth century. The stage was set: technology made long, complex narratives affordable and accessible.

What Makes a Novel Distinctive?

Several characteristics help define what a novel is—and they might not be what you expect. First, there is fictionality: fictionality is most commonly cited as distinguishing novels from historiography. However this can be a problematic criterion. Throughout the early modern period, authors of historical narratives would often include inventions rooted in traditional beliefs in order to embellish a passage of text or add credibility to an opinion. Historians would also invent and compose speeches for didactic purposes.

Novels can, on the other hand, depict the social, political and personal realities of a place and period with clarity and detail not found in works of history. Several novels, for example Ông cố vấn written by Hữu Mai, were designed to be and defined as a "non-fiction" novel which purposefully recorded historical facts in the form of a novel.

Second, there is literary prose: while prose rather than verse became the standard of the modern novel, the ancestors of the modern European novel include verse epics in the Romance language of southern France, especially those by Chrétien de Troyes (late twelfth century), and in Middle English—Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.

Even in the nineteenth century, fictional narratives in verse, such as Lord Byron's Don Juan (1824), Alexander Pushkin's Yevgeniy Onegin (1833), and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856), competed with prose novels. Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate (1986), composed of 590 Onegin stanzas, is a more recent example of the verse novel—a reminder that form boundaries have always been porous.

Third, there is intimacy: both in eleventh-century Japan and fifteenth-century Europe, prose fiction created intimate reading situations. Harold Bloom characterizes Lady Murasaki's use of intimacy and irony in The Tale of Genji as "having anticipated Cervantes as the first novelist." On the other hand, verse epics, including the Odyssey and Aeneid, had been recited to select audiences—though this was a more intimate experience than the performance of plays in theaters.

A new world of individualistic fashion, personal views, intimate feelings, secret anxieties, "conduct," and "gallantry" spread with novels and the associated prose-romance. The novel gave readers something they could not get from epic poetry: privacy. A relationship between reader and text that was genuinely personal.

Length and Expectation

The novel is today the longest genre of narrative prose fiction, followed by the novella. However, in the seventeenth century, critics saw the romance as of epic length and the novel as its short rival.

A precise definition of the differences in length between these types of fiction is not possible—different readers have different expectations, different cultures measure differently. The philosopher and literary critic György Lukács argued that the requirement of length is connected with the notion that a novel should encompass the totality of life. However, according to the English novelist E. M. Forster, a novel should be composed with at least fifty thousand words.

This matters because what we call "novel-length" shifts depending on who is asking and where they are standing. In East Asian countries like China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan, the word (xiǎoshuō) is used—literally meaning "small talks" or "little talks," referring to works of fiction of whatever length.

In Chinese, Japanese and Korean cultures, the concept of novel as it is understood in the Western world was termed as "long length small talk" (長篇小說), novella as "medium length small talk" (中篇小說), and short stories as "short length small talk" (短篇小説). In Vietnamese culture, however, the term exclusively refers to (long-length small talk)—the standard novel—while different terms are used for novellas and short stories.

This terminology originated from ancient Chinese classification of literature works into "small talks" (tales of daily life and trivial matters) and "great talks" ("sacred" classic works of great thinkers like Confucius). In other words, the ancient definition of "small talks" merely refers to trivial affairs, trivial facts—and can be quite different from the Western concept of novel.

"Such classification also left a strong legacy in interpretations of the Western definition of 'novel' at the time when Western literature was first introduced to East Asian countries"

The Never-Ending Form

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 nineteenth century, they have only become popular recently.

In Korea and Japan, very short stories stand out as a separate genre. Depending on their length, Korean works in the genre of soseol can be divided into novels (Korean: 장편 소설; hanja: 長篇小說), novella, and short story.

The novel has always been about transformation—about finding new ways to tell old stories. From ancient Greek tales to Renaissance novellas, from Cervantes to Defoe, from the Chinese classics to contemporary digital publishing, the novel remains what it has always been: a portal into other lives, other worlds, other minds. It is, at its core, an invitation into something new.

And that is precisely why we keep reading.