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The Novels Portal

Title page of the 1628 edition of Bacon's New Atlantis

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 classical 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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Original dust jacket

Lad: A Dog is a 1919 American novel written by Albert Payson Terhune and published by E. P. Dutton. Composed of twelve short stories first published in magazines, the novel is based on the life of Terhune's real-life Rough Collie, Lad. Born in 1902, the real-life Lad was an unregistered collie of unknown lineage originally owned by Terhune's father. Lad's death in 1918 was mourned by many of the story's fans, particularly children.

Through the stories of Lad's adventures, Terhune expresses his views on parenting, obtaining perfect obedience without force and the nature and rights of the "well-bred". Terhune began writing the stories in 1915 at the suggestion of his Red Book Magazine editor. They gained in popularity and, as Terhune was under contractual obligation to submit something to Doubleday-Page, he collected them into novel form. After Doubleday rejected the novel, he solicited other publishers until it was picked up by Dutton. After a slow start, the novel became a best seller in the adult fiction and children's fiction markets, having been repositioned as a young adult novel by Grosset and Dunlap in the 1960s and 1970s. Selling over one million copies, it is Terhune's best-selling work and the one that propelled him to fame. It has been reprinted over 70 times by Dutton and republished by a variety of publishers since its original release, including at least six international translations. (Full article...)

Selected novel quote

‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Wendy Moira Angela Darling,’ she replied with some satisfaction. ‘What is your name?’
‘Peter Pan.’
She was already sure that he must be Peter, but it did seem a comparatively short name.
‘Is that all?’
‘Yes,’ he said rather sharply. He felt for the first time that it was a shortish name.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Wendy Moira Angela.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Peter gulped.
She asked where he lived.
‘Second to the right,’ said Peter, ‘and then straight on till morning.’
‘What a funny address!’
Peter had a sinking feeling. For the first time he felt that perhaps it was a funny address.
“A moment after the fairy’s entrance the window was blow open by the breathing of the little stars, and Peter dropped in.”

Peter Pan

More selected quotes

Did you know...

...that Joe Keenan's 2006 novel My Lucky Star won the Thurber Prize for American Humor in 2007?
...that when Jean-Paul Sartre's classic first novel Nausea appeared in 1938, it was reviewed by Albert Camus, still a journalist in Algeria working on his own later-classic first novel, The Stranger?
...that the short story "The Congress" by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was published in a deluxe edition with the letters made of gold?

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General images

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

Image 1A modern chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 2One 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 3Statue of Ostap Bender in Elista (from Picaresque novel)
Image 4Adventure novels and short stories were popular subjects for American pulp magazines. (from Adventure fiction)
Image 5Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladivostok, 1995 (from Novel)
Image 6The chapbook Jack the Giant Killer (from Chapbook)
Image 7"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 8Woodcut of a fairy-circle from a 17th-century chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 91915 novelization of the original 1904 play Peter and Wendy (from Novelization)
Image 10Image from a Victorian edition of Walter Scott's Waverley (1814) (from Novel)
Image 11Paper as the essential carrier: Murasaki Shikibu writing her The Tale of Genji in the early 11th century, 17th-century depiction (from Novel)
Image 121719 newspaper reprint of Robinson Crusoe (from Novel)
Image 13Richard Head, The English Rogue (1665) (from Novel)
Image 14Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol.6, pp. 70–71 (1769) (from Novel)
Image 15Chinua Achebe, Buffalo, 2008 (from Novel)
Image 16A 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 17Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1741) (from Novel)
Image 18A light novel bookstore in Macau (from Light novel)
Image 19The picaresque genre began with the Spanish novel Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) (Pictured: Its title page) (from Picaresque novel)
Image 20Chaucer reciting Troilus and Criseyde: early-15th-century manuscript of the work at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (from Novel)
Image 21Madame de Pompadour spending her afternoon with a book (François Boucher, 1756) (from Novel)
Image 22King Kong (1932) novelization of King Kong (1933) (from Novelization)
Image 23Novelization of chapter 8 of the film series Les Vampires (1915–16) (from Novelization)
Image 24J. K. Rowling, 2010 (from Novel)
Image 25Dan Brown (from Novel)
Image 26Intimate short stories: The Court and City Vagaries (1711). (from Novel)
Image 271474: 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 28The 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 29Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) (from Novel)
Image 30First edition of Aleksis Kivi's The Seven Brothers (1870) (from Novel)
Image 31Harlequin novels (from Romance novel)

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