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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 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...)

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El Señor Presidente is a 1946 novel by Nobel Prize-winning Guatemalan writer Miguel Ángel Asturias. A landmark text in Latin American literature, El Señor Presidente explores the nature of political dictatorship and its effects on society. Asturias also makes early use of a literary technique that would come to be known as magic realism. One of the most notable works of the dictator novel genre, El Señor Presidente developed from an earlier Asturias short story, written to protest social injustice in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake in the author's home town. Although El Señor Presidente does not explicitly identify its setting as early twentieth-century Guatemala, the novel's title character was inspired by the 1898–1920 presidency of Manuel Estrada Cabrera. Asturias began writing the novel in the 1920s and finished it in 1933, but the strict censorship policies of Guatemalan dictatorial governments delayed its publication for a further thirteen years. The character the President rarely appears in the story but Asturias creates a number of other characters to show the terrible effects of living under a dictatorship. The style of El Señor Presidente influenced a generation of Latin American authors. In 1967, Asturias received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his entire body of work. This international acknowledgment was celebrated throughout Latin America, where it was seen as a recognition of the region's literature as a whole. Since then, El Señor Presidente has been adapted for the screen three times.

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Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

Lolita

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Did you know...

...that Michael Moorcock wrote the book The City in the Autumn Stars in tandem with The Laughter of Carthage, one during the day, and the other at night?
...that Po-on and the rest of the Rosales Saga novel series by F. Sionil José resemble the story-telling tradition found in the U.S.A. trilogy by John Dos Passos?
...that the names of the two main characters of Nicholas Sparks' 2002 novel Nights in Rodanthe are a Christmas present to his in-laws?

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General images

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

Image 1Richard Head, The English Rogue (1665) (from Novel)
Image 2Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) (from Novel)
Image 3Dan Brown (from Novel)
Image 4Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol.6, pp. 70–71 (1769) (from Novel)
Image 5Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladivostok, 1995 (from Novel)
Image 6"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 7Intimate short stories: The Court and City Vagaries (1711). (from Novel)
Image 8Statue of Ostap Bender in Elista (from Picaresque novel)
Image 9A modern chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 101474: 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 11Harlequin novels (from Romance novel)
Image 12J. K. Rowling, 2010 (from Novel)
Image 13A light novel bookstore in Macau (from Light novel)
Image 14Chaucer reciting Troilus and Criseyde: early-15th-century manuscript of the work at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (from Novel)
Image 15The 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 161719 newspaper reprint of Robinson Crusoe (from Novel)
Image 17The chapbook Jack the Giant Killer (from Chapbook)
Image 18Chinua Achebe, Buffalo, 2008 (from Novel)
Image 19Paper as the essential carrier: Murasaki Shikibu writing her The Tale of Genji in the early 11th century, 17th-century depiction (from Novel)
Image 20Madame de Pompadour spending her afternoon with a book (François Boucher, 1756) (from Novel)
Image 21Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1741) (from Novel)
Image 22The picaresque genre began with the Spanish novel Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) (Pictured: Its title page) (from Picaresque novel)
Image 23Adventure novels and short stories were popular subjects for American pulp magazines. (from Adventure fiction)
Image 241915 novelization of the original 1904 play Peter and Wendy (from Novelization)
Image 25First edition of Aleksis Kivi's The Seven Brothers (1870) (from Novel)
Image 26Image from a Victorian edition of Walter Scott's Waverley (1814) (from Novel)
Image 27King Kong (1932) novelization of King Kong (1933) (from Novelization)
Image 28One 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 29Novelization of chapter 8 of the film series Les Vampires (1915–16) (from Novelization)
Image 30Woodcut of a fairy-circle from a 17th-century chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 31A nineteenth-century painting by the Swiss-French painter Marc Gabriel Charles Gleyre depicting a scene from Longus's Daphnis and Chloe (from Romance novel)

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