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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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Cover, first printing (1929)

Drama dari Krakatau ([ˈdrama daˈri kraˈkatau]; Drama of Krakatoa) is a 1929 vernacular Malay novel written by Kwee Tek Hoay. Inspired by Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1834 novel The Last Days of Pompeii and the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, the sixteen-chapter book centres on two families in 1920s Batam that are unknowingly tied together by siblings who were separated in 1883. The brother becomes a political figure, while the sister marries a Baduy priest-king. Ultimately, these families are reunited by the wedding of their children, after which the priest sacrifices himself to calm a stirring Krakatoa.

First published as a serial in Kwee's magazine Panorama between 7 April and 22 December 1928, Drama dari Krakatau was written over a period of two months after the author was asked to prepare a "sensational" story for a film. Before the final instalment had been published, the novel had already been adapted for the stage. Although Kwee was known as a realist and researched the volcano before writing, Drama dari Krakatau is replete with mysticism. Thematic analyses have focused on the depiction of indigenous cultures by Kwee (himself ethnic Chinese), as well as geography and nationalism. As with other works of Chinese Malay literature, the book is not considered part of the Indonesian literary canon. (Full article...)

Selected novel quote

Religion is a solace to many people and it is even conceivable that some religion, somewhere, really is Ultimate Truth. But in many cases, being religious is merely a form of conceit. The Bible Belt faith in which I was brought up encouraged me to think that I was better than the rest of the world; I was 'saved' and they were 'damned' — we were in a state of grace and the rest of the world were 'heathens' and by 'heathen' they meant such people as our brother Mahmoud. It meant that an ignorant, stupid lout who seldom bathed and planted his corn by the phase of the Moon could claim to know the final answers of the Universe. That entitled him to look down his nose at everybody else. Our hymn book was loaded with such arrogance — mindless, conceited, self-congratulation on how cozy we were with the Almighty and what a high opinion he had of us and us alone, and what hell everybody else was going to catch come Judgment Day.

Stranger in a Strange Land

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Did you know...

...that the romantic epistles Letters of a Portuguese Nun were from a nun to her lover?
...that some elements of the Jules Verne adventure story Two Years' Vacation are to be found in William Golding's Lord of the Flies, written 66 years later?
...that the Viagens Interplanetarias series of science fiction stories by L. Sprague de Camp was influenced by Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian novels?

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General images

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

Image 1The picaresque genre began with the Spanish novel Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) (Pictured: Its title page) (from Picaresque novel)
Image 2Adventure novels and short stories were popular subjects for American pulp magazines. (from Adventure fiction)
Image 3Statue of Ostap Bender in Elista (from Picaresque novel)
Image 4Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladivostok, 1995 (from Novel)
Image 5Intimate short stories: The Court and City Vagaries (1711). (from Novel)
Image 6One 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 7A modern chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 8Richard Head, The English Rogue (1665) (from Novel)
Image 9Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) (from Novel)
Image 10Chaucer reciting Troilus and Criseyde: early-15th-century manuscript of the work at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (from Novel)
Image 11Woodcut of a fairy-circle from a 17th-century chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 12Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1741) (from Novel)
Image 13King Kong (1932) novelization of King Kong (1933) (from Novelization)
Image 14Harlequin novels (from Romance novel)
Image 15Paper as the essential carrier: Murasaki Shikibu writing her The Tale of Genji in the early 11th century, 17th-century depiction (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 17The 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 18A light novel bookstore in Macau (from Light novel)
Image 19First edition of Aleksis Kivi's The Seven Brothers (1870) (from Novel)
Image 20"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 21Madame de Pompadour spending her afternoon with a book (François Boucher, 1756) (from Novel)
Image 221719 newspaper reprint of Robinson Crusoe (from Novel)
Image 231915 novelization of the original 1904 play Peter and Wendy (from Novelization)
Image 24Novelization of chapter 8 of the film series Les Vampires (1915–16) (from Novelization)
Image 25Dan Brown (from Novel)
Image 26J. K. Rowling, 2010 (from Novel)
Image 27The chapbook Jack the Giant Killer (from Chapbook)
Image 28Image from a Victorian edition of Walter Scott's Waverley (1814) (from Novel)
Image 291474: 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 30Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol.6, pp. 70–71 (1769) (from Novel)
Image 31Chinua Achebe, Buffalo, 2008 (from Novel)

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