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    What Is A Novel Definition Handout

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    The novel originated from Italian novellas and early Roman fiction, telling stories in prose about ordinary people and events rather than epic poems about heroes and battles. The English novel emerged in the 18th century alongside developments in literacy, printing, and the rise of the middle class. Novels are characterized by their attempts at realistic portrayals of human experiences and daily life through complex and developing characters.

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    What Is A Novel Definition Handout

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    melodi3685
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    The novel originated from Italian novellas and early Roman fiction, telling stories in prose about ordinary people and events rather than epic poems about heroes and battles. The English novel emerged in the 18th century alongside developments in literacy, printing, and the rise of the middle class. Novels are characterized by their attempts at realistic portrayals of human experiences and daily life through complex and developing characters.

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    What is a Novel Definition Handout

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    The novel originated from Italian novellas and early Roman fiction, telling stories in prose about ordinary people and events rather than epic poems about heroes and battles. The English novel emerged in the 18th century alongside developments in literacy, printing, and the rise of the middle class. Novels are characterized by their attempts at realistic portrayals of human experiences and daily life through complex and developing characters.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    7 views1 page

    What Is A Novel Definition Handout

    Uploaded by

    melodi3685
    The novel originated from Italian novellas and early Roman fiction, telling stories in prose about ordinary people and events rather than epic poems about heroes and battles. The English novel emerged in the 18th century alongside developments in literacy, printing, and the rise of the middle class. Novels are characterized by their attempts at realistic portrayals of human experiences and daily life through complex and developing characters.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 1

    The Novel

    A novel, is an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals
    imaginatively with human experience, usually through a connected sequence of events involving a
    group of people in a specific setting and published in the form of a book. The novel is
    a genre of fiction, and fiction may be defined as the art or craft of contriving, through the written
    word, representations of human life that instruct or divert or both.

    Where does it originate from?

    The term novel is a truncation of the Italian word novella (from the plural of Latin novellus, a
    late variant of novus, meaning “new”). The novella was a kind of enlarged anecdote like those to be
    found in the 14th-century Italian classic Boccaccio’s Decameron, each of which exemplifies the
    etymology well enough. The stories are little new things, novelties, freshly minted diversions, toys;
    they are not reworkings of known fables or myths, and at the time they were supposedly lacking in
    weight and moral earnestness.
    Going back thousands of years, early ancient Roman fiction such as Petronius’ Satyricon of
    the 1st century AD and Lucius Apuleius’ Golden Ass of the 2nd century contain many of the popular
    elements that distinguish the novel from its nobler born relative the epic poem. In the fictional
    works, the medium is prose, the events described are unheroic, the settings are streets and taverns,
    not battlefields and palaces.
    The medieval chivalric romance (from a popular Latin word, probably Romanice, meaning
    written in the vernacular, not in traditional Latin) restored a kind of epic view of man—though now
    as heroic Christian, not heroic pagan. At the same time, it bequeathed its name to the later genre of
    continental literature, the novel, which is known in French as roman, in Italian as romanzo, etc. But
    that later genre achieved its first great flowering in Spain at the beginning of the 17th century in an
    anti-chivalric comic masterpiece—the Don Quixote of Cervantes.
    The English novel emerged in the 18th century, with the rise of capitalism, the creation of the
    middle class and congruent developments both in literacy and printing where books became
    purchasable commodities. The early English novels concerned themselves with complex, middle-
    class characters struggling with their morality and circumstances. "Pamela," written in epistolary
    form in 1741 by Samuel Richardson, is considered the first ‘real’ English novel. The initial impression
    of novels was that they were fanciful, frivolous and fashionable, particularly as a high proportion of
    their readership (and eventually authorship) were women.
    The novel differs from previous work in that it is characterized by ‘realism’. Realism isn't to
    be defined as the opposite of idealism but rather the attempt at a portrayal of all aspects of human
    experience. Realism lies in the manner in which our reality, experiences and life in all its forms are
    represented. The novel is marked by the attempt to view life scientifically, moving away from the
    abstract to the beauty of the particular. Previously there was no interest in the realistic minutiae of
    daily life; in the novel there is. Characters have the potential to develop over time in a
    psychologically plausible manner and are able to escape the confines of static moral values. However
    this interest in realism necessitates a much more careful portrayal of time playing out in the
    narrative. Of course, as the novel evolves through different socio-historic and artistic movements,
    writers experiment with notions such as “reality” and “realism” in order to reflect and express their
    contemporary experience.

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