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.

Literature

Contemporary Views of the History of the Novel

• 1651: Paul Scarron, The Comical Romance, Chapter XXI. "Which perhaps will not be found very Entertaining" (London, 1700). Scarron's plea for a French production rivalling the Spanish "Novels". Marteau
• 1670: Pierre Daniel Huet, "Traitté de l'origine des romans", Preface to Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne comtesse de La Fayette, Zayde, histoire espagnole (Paris, 1670). A wold history of fiction. pdf-edition Gallica France
• 1683: "Sentimens sur l?histoire" from: Sentimens sur les lettres et sur l?histoire, avec des scruples sur le stile (Paris: C. Blageart, 1680). The new novels as published masterly by Marie de LaFayette . Marteau
• 1702: Abbe Bellegarde, "Lettre à une Dame de la Cour, qui lui avoit demandé quelques Reflexions sur l?Histoire" aus: Lettres curieuses de littérature et de morale (La Haye: Adrian Moetjens, 1702). Paraphrase of Du Sieur's text. Marteau
• 1705/ 1708/ 1712: In Englisch, French and German the Preface of The Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians (Albigion, 1705) Bellegarde's article plagiarised. Marteau
• 1713: Deutsche Acta Eruditorum, German review of the French translation of Delarivier Manley's New Atalantis 1709 (Leipzig: J. L. Gleditsch, 1713). A rare example of a political novel discussed by a literary journal. Marteau
• 1715: Jane Barker, preface to her Exilius or the Banish?d Roman. A New Romance (London: E. Curll, 1715). Plea for a "New Romance" following Fénlon's Telmachus. Marteau
• 1718: "Satyra von den Liebes-Romanen", from: Die abentheuerliche Welt in einer Pickelheerings-Kappe, 2 ( 1718). German satire about the wide spread reading of novels and romances. Marteau
• 1742: Henry Fielding, preface to Joseph Andrews (London, 1742). The "comic epic in prose" and its poetics. Blackmask

Secondary Literature

• Georg Lukács, Theorie des Romans (1916).
• Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. Reads Robinson Crusoe as the first modern "novel" and interprets the rise of the modern novel of realism as an achievement of English literature, owed to a number of factors from early capitalism to the development of the modern individual.
• Burgess, Anthony. The Novel To-day (1963); The Novel Now: A Student's Guide to Contemporary Fiction (1967); 'Novel, The', classic Encyclopedia Britannica entry (1970).
• Davis, Lennard J., Factual Fictions. The Origins of the English Novel (New York, 1983). To be read with care. The preface to "The Secret History of Queen Zarah" is not identified as an original French text on the rise of the novel from Cervantes to Marie de LaFayette; Davis' idea the novel could have developed as the news of modern newspapers is pronounced without the best awareness of the newspapers of Defoe's day.
• Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
• McKeon, Michael, The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740 (Baltimore, 1987).
• Hunter, J.P. Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. New York: Norton and Co., 1990.
• Ballaster, Ros. Seductive Forms: Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684?1740. Oxford: Clarendson Press, 1992.
• Doody, Margaret Anne. The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996.
• Simons, Olaf, Marteaus Europa oder der Roman, bevor er Literatur wurde (Amsterdam, 2001). A market study of the novel around 1700 interpreting contemporary criticism.