Portal:Novels

Portal topics: Activities; Culture; Geography; Health; History; Mathematics; Nature; People; Philosophy; Religion; Society; Technology; Random portal

The Novels Portal

A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction 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". Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, John Cowper Powys, preferred the term "romance" to describe their novels.

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, in Chivalric romance, and in the tradition of the Italian renaissance novella. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, especially the historical romances of Walter Scott and the Gothic novel. Some, including 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 The Lord of the Rings, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Frankenstein. "Romances" are works of fiction whose main emphasis is on marvellous or unusual incidents, and should not be confused with the romance novel, a type of genre fiction that focuses on romantic love. (Full article...)

Refresh with new selections below (purge)

Featured article - show another

This is a featured article, which represents some of the best content on English Wikipedia..

Irish Thoroughbred, the debut novel by American author Nora Roberts (pictured), was first published in January 1981 as a category romance. Like other category romances, it was less than 200 pages and was intended to be on sale for only one month. It proved so popular that it was repackaged as a stand-alone romance and reprinted multiple times. Roberts drew on her Irish heritage to create an Irish heroine, Adelia "Dee" Cunnane. In the novel, Dee moves to the United States, where her sick uncle arranges for her to marry his employer, wealthy American horsebreeder Travis Grant. Although the early part of their relationship is marked by frequent arguments, by the end of the story Travis and Dee reconcile. According to one critic, the couple's transformation from adversaries to a loving married couple is one of many formulaic elements in the book. Although the protagonists adhered to many stereotypes common to 1980s romance novels, Roberts's heroine is more independent and feisty than most others of the time. Roberts wrote two sequels, Irish Rebel and Irish Rose.

More selected articles

More...

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

More selected quotes

Did you know...

...that Kurt Vonnegut's short story 2BR02B is mentioned in his later book God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, where it is attributed to Vonnegut's fictional alter ego Kilgore Trout?
...that My Brother, My Executioner, a 1970s novel by F. Sionil José, is a narrative about two half-brothers with opposing Filipino ideologies?
...that children's novel Nordy Bank by Sheena Porter, set in Nordy Bank on Brown Clee Hill, Shropshire, was awarded the 1964 Carnegie Medal in Literature?

More Did you know facts

More...

General images

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

Image 1Dan Brown (from Novel)
Image 21719 newspaper reprint of Robinson Crusoe (from Novel)
Image 3Chaucer reciting Troilus and Criseyde: early-15th-century manuscript of the work at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (from Novel)
Image 4Adventure novels and short stories were popular subjects for American pulp magazines. (from Adventure fiction)
Image 5Paper as the essential carrier: Murasaki Shikibu writing her The Tale of Genji in the early 11th century, 17th-century depiction (from Novel)
Image 6A 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 7Woodcut of a fairy-circle from a 17th-century chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 8Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) (from Novel)
Image 9A modern-day chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 10Statue of Ostap Bender in Elista (from Picaresque novel)
Image 11King Kong (1932) novelization of King Kong (1933) (from Novelization)
Image 12Chinua Achebe, Buffalo, 2008 (from Novel)
Image 13Harlequin novels (from Romance novel)
Image 14The chapbook Jack the Giant Killer (from Chapbook)
Image 15A light novel bookstore in Macau (from Light novel)
Image 16Image from a Victorian edition of Walter Scott's Waverley (1814) (from Novel)
Image 17Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1741) (from Novel)
Image 181915 novelization of the original 1904 play Peter and Wendy (from Novelization)
Image 19"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 20J. K. Rowling, 2010 (from Novel)
Image 21Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol.6, pp. 70–71 (1769) (from Novel)
Image 22Novelization of chapter 8 of the film series Les Vampires (1915–16). (from Novelization)
Image 231474: 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 24Richard Head, The English Rogue (1665) (from Novel)
Image 25Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladivostok, 1995 (from Novel)
Image 26Madame de Pompadour spending her afternoon with a book (François Boucher, 1756) (from Novel)
Image 27The modern picaresque began with the Spanish novel Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) (title page) (from Picaresque novel)
Image 28Intimate short stories: The Court and City Vagaries (1711). (from Novel)
Image 29Chapbook frontispiece of Voltaire's The Extraordinary Tragical Fate of Calas, showing a man being tortured on a breaking wheel, late 18th century (from Chapbook)

Subcategories

Featured content

This is a list of recognized content, updated weekly by JL-Bot (talk · contribs). There is no need to edit the list yourself. If an article is missing from the list, make sure it is tagged (e.g. {{WikiProject Novels}}) or categorized correctly. See WP:RECOG for configuration options.