A novel is a long prose narrative that describes fictional characters and events, usually in the form of a sequential story. The genre has historical roots in antiquity and the fields ofmedieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter, an Italian word used to describe short stories, supplied the present generic English term in the 18th century.
Further definition of the genre is historically difficult. The construction of the narrative, theplot, the relation to reality, the characterization, and the use of language are usually discussed to show a novel's artistic merits. Most of these requirements were introduced to literary prose in the 16th and 17th centuries, in order to give fiction a justification outside the field of factual history.
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Definition[edit] Gerard ter Borch, young man reading a book c.1680, the format is that of a French period novel. | Madame de Pompadourspending her afternoon with a book, 1756 – religious and scientific reading has a differenticonography. |
The fictional narrative, the novel's distinct "literary" prose, specific media requirements (the use of paper and print), a characteristic subject matter that creates intimacy, and length can be seen as features that developed with the Western (and modern) market of fiction. The separation of the field of literary fiction from the field of historical narrative fueled the evolution of these features in the last 400 years.
A fictional narrative[edit]
Fictionality is the most commonly cited feature to distinguish novels from historiography. From a historical perspective this can be a problematic criterion. Throughout the early modern period, authors of historical accounts in narrative form would often include inventions which were rooted in traditional beliefs in order to embellish a passage of text or add