Portal:Novels

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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. (Full article...)

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The Hugo Award for Best Novel is one of the Hugo Awards given each year for science fiction or fantasy stories published in, or translated to, English during the previous calendar year. The novel award is available for works of fiction of 40,000 words or more; awards are also given out in the short story, novelette, and novella categories. The Hugo Awards have been described as "a fine showcase for speculative fiction", and "the best known literary award for science fiction writing".

The Hugo Award for Best Novel has been awarded annually by the World Science Fiction Society since 1953, except in 1954 and 1957. In addition, beginning in 1996, Retrospective Hugo Awards or "Retro-Hugos" have been available for works published 50, 75, or 100 years prior. Retro-Hugos may only be awarded for years after 1939 in which no awards were originally given. To date, Retro-Hugo awards have been given for novels for 1939, 1941, 1943—1946, 1951, and 1954. (Full article...)

Selected novel quote

It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realized, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn't sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it's all you have got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.

Shantaram

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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 1Dan Brown (from Novel)
Image 2Paper as the essential carrier: Murasaki Shikibu writing her The Tale of Genji in the early 11th century, 17th-century depiction (from Novel)
Image 3A light novel bookstore in Macau (from Light novel)
Image 4Adventure novels and short stories were popular subjects for American pulp magazines. (from Adventure fiction)
Image 5Image from a Victorian edition of Walter Scott's Waverley (from Novel)
Image 6Chinua Achebe, Buffalo, 2008 (from Novel)
Image 71719 newspaper reprint of Robinson Crusoe (from 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 10Madame de Pompadour spending her afternoon with a book (François Boucher, 1756) (from Novel)
Image 11Richard Head, The English Rogue (1665) (from Novel)
Image 12Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladivostok, 1995 (from Novel)
Image 13A modern-day chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 141474: 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 15Statue of Ostap Bender in Elista (from Picaresque novel)
Image 16J. K. Rowling, 2010 (from Novel)
Image 17Chapbook frontispiece of Voltaire's The Extraordinary Tragical Fate of Calas, showing a man being tortured on a breaking wheel, late 18th century (from Chapbook)
Image 18Intimate short stories: The Court and City Vagaries (1711). (from Novel)
Image 19The modern picaresque began with the Spanish novel Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) (title page) (from Picaresque novel)
Image 20Novelization of chapter 8 of the film series Les Vampires (1915–16). (from Novelization)
Image 21Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1741) (from Novel)
Image 22The chapbook Jack the Giant Killer (from Chapbook)
Image 23Chaucer reciting Troilus and Criseyde: early-15th-century manuscript of the work at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (from Novel)
Image 24Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) (from Novel)
Image 25"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 26Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol.6, pp. 70–71 (1769) (from Novel)
Image 27Harlequin novels (from Romance novel)
Image 28A nineteenth-century painting by the Swiss-French painter Marc Gabriel Charles Gleyre depicting a scene from Longus's Daphnis and Chloe (from Romance novel)

Subcategories

Novel categories

▼ Novels

► Novels by age-group

► Novels by award

► Novels by country

► Novels by date

► Novels by genre

► Novels by language

► Novels by order

► Novels by publication status

► Novels by series

► Novels by setting

► Novels by source

► Novels by theme

► Novels by topic

► Novels by writer

► Novelists

► Works about novels

► Novels adapted into works

► Works adapted into novels

► Lists of novels

► Works based on novels

► Characters in novels

► Metafictional novels

► Novel forms

► Novels involved in plagiarism controversies

► Novel stubs

► Wikipedia categories named after novels

Featured content

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