Novel

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Novelist have also been interested in the subject of racial and gender identity in recent decades. Louis has described Chuck Palahniuk 's Fight Club as "a closeted feminist critique". Furthermore, the major political and military confrontations of the 20th and 21st centuries have also influenced novelists.

Scope, or dimension

The subsequent Cold War influenced popular spy novels. Another major 20th-century social events, the so-called sexual revolution is reflected in the modern novel. Lawrence 's Lady Chatterley's Lover had to be published in Italy in ; British censorship lifted its ban as late as In the second half of the 20th century, Postmodern authors subverted serious debate with playfulness, claiming that art could never be original, that it always plays with existing materials. A postmodernist re-reads popular literature as an essential cultural production. Thriller , Westerns and Speculative fiction.

While the reader of so-called serious literature will follow public discussions of novels, popular fiction production employs more direct and short-term marketing strategies by openly declarating of the work's genre. Popular novels are based entirely on the expectations for the particular genre, and this includes the creation of a series of novels with an identifiable brand name.

Popular literature holds a larger market share.

Genre literature might be seen as the successor of the early modern chapbook. Both fields share a focus on readers who are in search of accessible reading satisfaction. The modern adventure novel goes back to Daniel Defoe 's Robinson Crusoe and its immediate successors. Modern pornography has no precedent in the chapbook market but originates in libertine and hedonistic belles lettres, of works like John Cleland 's Fanny Hill and similar eighteenth century novels.

Ian Fleming 's James Bond is a descendant of the anonymous yet extremely sophisticated and stylish narrator who mixed his love affairs with his political missions in La Guerre d'Espagne Marion Zimmer Bradley 's The Mists of Avalon is influenced by Tolkien , as well as Arthurian literature , including its 19th-century successors. Modern horror fiction also has no precedent on the market of chapbooks but goes back to the elitist market of earlyth-century Romantic literature.

Modern popular science fiction has an even shorter history, from the s. The authors of popular fiction tend to advertise that they have exploited a controversial topic and this is a major difference between them and so-called elitist literature.

The 100 best novels written in English: the full list

Dan Brown , for example, discusses, on his website, the question whether his Da Vinci Code is an anti-Christian novel. However, the boundaries between popular and serious literature have blurred in recent years, with postmodernism and poststructuralism , as well as by adaptation of popular literary classics by the film and television industries. Crime became a major subject of 20th and 21st century genre novelists and crime fiction reflects the realities of modern industrialized societies. Crime is both a personal and public subject: Patricia Highsmith 's thrillers became a medium of new psychological explorations.

Paul Auster 's New York Trilogy — is an example of experimental postmodernist literature based on this genre. Fantasy is another major area of commercial fiction, and A major example is J. Tolkien in fact revived the tradition of European epic literature in the tradition of Beowulf , the North Germanic Edda and the Arthurian Cycles. Science fiction , is another important type of genre fiction and it has developed in a variety of ways, ranging from the early, technological adventure Jules Verne had made fashionable in the s, to Aldous Huxley 's Brave New World about Western consumerism and technology.

Clarke produced modern classics which focus on the interaction between humans and machines. The surreal novels of Philip K Dick such as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch explore the nature of reality, reflecting the widespread recreational experimentation with drugs and cold-war paranoia of the 60's and 70's. Writers such as Ursula le Guin and Margaret Atwood explore feminist and broader social issues in their works.

William Gibson , author of the cult classic Neuromancer , is one of a new wave of authors who explore post-apocalyptic fantasies and virtual reality. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see Novel disambiguation. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.

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Not to be confused with Novell. This section needs additional citations for verification.

March Learn how and when to remove this template message. Ancient Greek novel and Byzantine novel. Heroic romances and 17th-century French literature. French literature of the 19th century and Victorian literature. Modernism , Postmodernism , Antinovel , and Nouveau roman. February Learn how and when to remove this template message. British regional literature Chain novel Children's literature Gay literature Nautical fiction Proletarian novel Psychological novel Sociology of literature Social novel War novel Web fiction.

Rutgers University Press, , rept. Retrieved 25 April Oxford University Press, , p. Romance should not be confused with Harlequin Romance. The Great Writers [] London: A historico-philosophical essay on the forms of great epic literature [first German edition ], transl. The MIT Press, Daphnis and Chloe; Xenophon of Ephesus: Curzon Press, , p. An Anthology of Sources , p. Schmeling, and Tim Whitmarsh hrsg.

Oxford University Press, Lewis , The Discarded Image , p. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved 19 April The Great Reclothing of Rural England.

Novel - definition of novel by The Free Dictionary

Proceedings of the Scottish Society of Antiquarians Zur Literaturgeschichte des einfachen Lesers. Die abentheuerliche Welt in einer Pickelheerings-Kappe , vol. Poetik, Funktion und Rezeption einer niederen Gattung im Frankreich des Narrative Forms, — University of Delaware Press, Sentimens sur les lettres et sur l'histoire, avec des scruples sur le stile Paris: The Essence of Style: Pearl Buck and the Chinese Novel , p. Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding London, Penguin Books, , p. Morphew, , would thus include the story of "Lucian's Ass", vol.

Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, — New York: Zone, , Inger Leemans, Het woord is aan de onderkant: Vantilt, , and Lisa Z. Pornography and Social Change in England, — January: Scholarly Book Services Inc, Caldecott, , pp. Gale Research Co, ff. Morphew, ; The Works of Lucian, , 2 vols. See The Adventures of Theagenes and Chariclia [ Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature , 2nd ed.

Davies Group, Publishers, Prentice Hall, , p. Marion Wynne Davis, p. The Invention of Copyright 3rd ed. James Engell, The committed word: Eigner, George John Worth ed. The North American Review , Vol. Studies in English Literature , —, Vol. Preston , p. Harmon and Holman , p. Hayden White , Metahistory: Johns Hopkins University , The Stream-of-consciousness technique in the modern novel Port Washington, N.

On the extra-European usage of the technique see also: Chuck Palahniuk, Closet Moralist". The International Journal of Existential Literature. Check date values in: Choose the Right Synonym for novel Adjective new , novel , original , fresh mean having recently come into existence or use. Examples of novel in a Sentence Adjective She has suggested a novel approach to the problem. Handheld computers are novel devices. Recent Examples on the Web: Adjective While designing restaurants for the Italian owners, Hilzim learned the art of fresh pasta, a then- novel concept in the United States.

What seems like common sense to an adult or college student might be novel to your average year-old. First Known Use of novel Adjective 15th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1 Noun , in the meaning defined at sense 1. Learn More about novel. Resources for novel Time Traveler! Explore the year a word first appeared. Dictionary Entries near novel Novato novator Novaya Zemlya novel novel assignment novel disseizin novelese.

Time Traveler for novel The first known use of novel was in the 15th century See more words from the same century.

Word Origin & History

More Definitions for novel. More from Merriam-Webster on novel Thesaurus: All synonyms and antonyms for novel Spanish Central: Translation of novel Nglish: Translation of novel for Spanish Speakers Britannica English: No novel can theoretically be too long, but if it is too short it ceases to be a novel. It would seem that there are two ways of presenting human character—one, the brief way, through a significant episode in the life of a personage or group of personages; the other, which admits of limitless length, through the presentation of a large section of a life or lives, sometimes beginning with birth and ending in old age.

The plays of Shakespeare show that a full delineation of character can be effected in a very brief compass, so that, for this aspect of the novel, length confers no special advantage. Length, however, is essential when the novelist attempts to present something bigger than character—when, in fact, he aims at the representation of a whole society or period of history. No other cognate art form—neither the epic poem nor the drama nor the film—can match the resources of the novel when the artistic task is to bring to immediate, sensuous, passionate life the somewhat impersonal materials of the historian.

War and Peace is the great triumphant example of the panoramic study of a whole society—that of early 19th-century Russia—which enlightens as the historian enlightens and yet also conveys directly the sensations and emotions of living through a period of cataclysmic change. In the 20th century, another Russian, Boris Pasternak, in his Doctor Zhivago , expressed—though on a less than Tolstoyan scale—the personal immediacies of life during the Russian Revolution. Needless to say, length and weighty subject matter are no guarantee in themselves of fictional greatness.

Diffuseness is the great danger in the long novel, and diffuseness can mean slack writing, emotional self-indulgence, sentimentality. Even the long picaresque novel—which, in the hands of a Fielding or his contemporary Tobias Smollett , can rarely be accused of sentimentality—easily betrays itself into such acts of self-indulgence as the multiplication of incident for its own sake, the coy digression , the easygoing jogtrot pace that subdues the sense of urgency that should lie in all fiction.

Sometimes the scope of a fictional concept demands a technical approach analogous to that of the symphony in music—the creation of a work in separate books, like symphonic movements, each of which is intelligible alone but whose greater intelligibility depends on the theme and characters that unify them. In other words, the author could not know what the subject matter of the sequence would be until he was in sight of its end.

The aesthetic value of the work is frequently determined by subliminal forces that seem to operate independently of the writer, investing the properties of the surface story with a deeper significance.

A novel will then come close to myth , its characters turning into symbols of permanent human states or impulses, particular incarnations of general truths perhaps only realized for the first time in the act of reading. The ability to perform a quixotic act anteceded Don Quixote , just as bovarysme existed before Flaubert found a name for it.

But the desire to give a work of fiction a significance beyond that of the mere story is frequently conscious and deliberate, indeed sometimes the primary aim. The mythic or symbolic intention of a novel may manifest itself less in structure than in details which, though they appear naturalistic, are really something more.

In the Russian version of the Gospel According to St. The symbol, the special significance at a subnarrative level, works best when it can fit without obtrusion into a context of naturalism. There are symbolic novels whose infranarrative meaning cannot easily be stated, since it appears to subsist on an unconscious level. Mawr , in which the significance of the horse is powerful and mysterious. We welcome suggested improvements to any of our articles. You can make it easier for us to review and, hopefully, publish your contribution by keeping a few points in mind.

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Page 1 of 5. Learn More in these related Britannica articles: The theme and spirit of tragedy, meanwhile, found a new vehicle in the novel. This development is important, however far afield it may seem from the work of the formal dramatists. The late 18th century saw the rise of the Latin American novel. In these early novels, one encounters at every turn the Neoclassical conviction that society would be reformed by a combination of informed individual choice and state regulation. Francisco Javier Eugenio de Santa….

In prose fiction the vanguardia did not arrive as quickly. The first step was a renovation of the novel but within accepted 19th-century Realist forms. The first novels to be considered modern—that is, contemporary—in Latin American fiction were those written during and about the…. Griggs, and Charles W. Chesnutt, the novel became an instrument of social analysis and direct confrontation with the prejudices, stereotypes, and…. The novel as social analysis allegory In fable, parable, and allegory: Modern period Arabic literature In Arabic literature: Early novels In Latin American literature: The modern novel literary criticism In literary criticism: Neoclassicism and its decline popularity of the short story In short story: Decline of short fiction romance In romance: Later developments scope, composition, and form In literature: The scope of literature View More.

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