Novel

A novel (from French nouvelle, "new") is an extended fictional narrative in prose. Down into the 18th century, the word referred specifically to short fictions of love and intrigue as opposed to romances—epic-length works about love and adventures. Having become one of the major literary genres over the past 200 years the novel is today the object of discussions demanding artistic merits, a specific literary style and a deeper meaning than a true story of the same content could claim to have.

Individual Novels Discussed

From Western antiquity?Greece and Rome?these are the earliest, extant novels:

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• Xenophon, The Education of Cyrus (Greek, 4th century BC). A largely fictional account of the education of King Cyrus the Great of Persia. This is considered a precursor to the novel.
• Petronius, Satyricon (Latin, 1st century).
• Apuleius, The Golden Ass (Latin, 2nd century).
• Chariton, The Loves of Chaereas and Callirhoe (Greek, 1st century–2nd century).
• Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon (Greek, 2nd century).
• Longus, Daphnis and Chloe (Greek, 2nd century).
• Xenophon of Ephesus, Ephesian Tale (Greek, 2nd century–3rd century).
• Heliodorus, Ethiopian Tale (Greek, 3rd century–4th century).
• Anon, Acts of Xanthippe, Polyxena, and Rebecca (Greek, 3rd century–4th century).
• Anon, Joseph and Aseneth (Greek, 1st century–5th century).
• Anon, The Story of Apollonius, King of Tyre (Latin adaptation of lost Greek original, 5th century–6th century).

Asian works

Early important Asian novels include:

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• Dandin, The Adventures of the Ten Princes (Sanskrit, 6th century–7th century).
• Banabhatta, Kadambari (Sanskrit, 7th century).
• Anon, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter (Japanese, 10th century).
• Anon, The Tale of Ochikubo (Japanese, 10th century).
• Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji (Japanese, 11th century). Arguably the first novel, in the sense of a continued fictional narrative written by one author.
• Luo Guanzhong, Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Chinese, 14th century).

The 13th century

• Ramon Llull, Blanquerna (1283)

The 14th century

• Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (1386-1400)

The 15th century

• Antoine de la Sale, Petit Jehan de Saintré (1456)
• Thomas Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur, (English, 1485).
• Joanot Martorell, Tirant lo Blanc (Catalan, 1490), chivalric romance.

The 16th century

• Jacopo Sannazaro, La Arcadia, (Italian, 1504), pastoral novel.
• Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, Amadis of Gaul (Spanish adaptation of lost 13th century original, 1508).
• Thomas More, Utopia (Latin, circa 1516).
• François Rabelais, Pantagruel, (French, 1532).
• Jorge de Montemayor, La Diana (Spanish, 1559), pastoral novel.
• Anon, Lazarillo de Tormes (Spanish, 1554).
• Mateo Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache (Spanish, 1599).

The 17th century

• Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605).
• Miguel de Cervantes, Novelas Exemplares (1613).
• Francisco de Quevedo, El buscón (Spanish, 1626), masterpiece of the picaresque subgenre.
• Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Simplicissimus (German, 1668/1669), the Thirty Years War put into satirical autobiography.
• Aphra Behn, Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister (British, 1684/1685/1687), the first full blown epistolary novel.
• Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, (British, 1688).

The 18th century

• Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess, (British, 1719)
• Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, (British, 1719)
• Samuel Richardson, Pamela, (British, 1740)
• Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, (British, 1749)
• Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, (British, 1759-1767)
• Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, (Scottish, 1771)
• Ignacy Krasicki, The Adventures of Nicholas Experience (the first Polish novel, 1776).
• Frances Burney, Evelina, (British, 1778)
• Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, (British, 1794)
• Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, (British, 1796)

The 19th century

• Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (British, 1811).
• Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugene Onegin (Russian), 1825-1831.
• Stendhal, The Red and the Black (French, 1831).
• Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot (Old Goriot; French, 1835).
• Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma (French, 1839).
• Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time (Russian), 1839.
• Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed (Italian, 1840).
• Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (British, 1847).
• Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (British, 1847).
• Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (American, 1851).
• Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (British, 1857).
• Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (French,1857).
• Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov (Russian), 1859.
• Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (British, 1860-1861).
• Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons (Russian), 1861.
• Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (French, 1862).
• Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (Russian, 1865).
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment (Russian, 1866).
• George Eliot, Middlemarch (British, 1871).
• Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (Russian), (1875-1877).
• Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, An Ancient Tale (Polish, 1876).
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (Russian), 1880).
• Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (American, 1885).
• Gabriela Zapolska, Cathy the Caryatid (Polish, 1885 – 1886).
• Benito Pérez Galdós, Fortunata y Jacinta (Spanish, 1886-1887).
• Wilhelm Raabe, Stopfkuchen, 1891
• Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis (Polish, 1895).
• Bolesław Prus, Pharaoh (Polish, 1895).
• Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (Polish, 1897).
• Theodor Fontane, Der Stechlin, 1899

The 20th century

• Stefan Żeromski: Ashes (Polish, 1902 – 1903)
• Władysław Reymont: The Peasants (Polish, 1902 – 1909).
• Gabriela Zapolska, Seasonal Love (Polish, 1904).
• Marcel Proust In Search Of Lost Time (French, 1913-1927).
• James Joyce Ulysses (Irish, 1922).
• Thomas Mann The Magic Mountain (German, 1924).
• Franz Kafka The Trial (German, 1925).
• Betty Smith A Tree Grows In Brooklyn (American, 1943).
• Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse (British, 1927).
• Robert Musil The Man Without Qualities (Austrian, 1930-1942).
• William Faulkner As I Lay Dying (American, 1930).
• Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Insatiability (Polish, 1930).
• Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz, The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma (Polish, 1932).
• Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke (Polish, 1937).
• Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, Baalyakaalasakhi (Malayalam, 1944)

The 20th century also saw the emergence of many notable novelists of non-European and non-U.S. backgrounds. The years 1960 – 1967, in particular, witnessed the Latin America novel boom:

Related Topics:
1960 - 1967 - Latin America novel boom

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• Mario Vargas Llosa, La ciudad y los perros (Spanish, 1963).
• Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad (Spanish).
• Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits (1982)

The most notable African American novelists have included:

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• Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
• Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
• James Baldwin, Another Country (1962)
• Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

Modernism continued into the late 20th century, sometimes becoming postmodernism; Toni Morrison (above) is part of that tradition:

Related Topics:
Modernism - Postmodernism

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• Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
• Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
• Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (1980)
• Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

Other novelists ignored or reacted against modernism:

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• John Updike, the Rabbit tetralogy (1959–1990)

Genre novels

From the late Victorian period to the present, several types of "genre" novels and romances have been popular. While often slighted by critics and academics, these have been as popular as the more critically and academically acclaimed novels; in recent times, the best of them have been recognized as serious literature. Some categories of genre fiction are:

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• science fiction
• fantasy
• crime fiction
• westerns
• romance novels
• spy novels and thrillers