Novel: Difference between revisions - Wikipedia

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[[File:Madame de Pompadour.jpg|thumb|200|Madame Pompadour spending her afternoon with a book, 1756 − religious and scientific reading has a different [[iconography]].]]

The requirement of a certain length<ref>The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America ''Nebula Award'' [http://www.sfwa.org/awards/faq.htm#6] gives the following guidelines: Novel — 40,000 words or more; Novella — 17,500–39,999 words; Novelette — 7,500–17,499 words; Short Story — 7,499 words or fewer.</ref> employedis a 19th-century achievement. It is today connected with the notion that novels (in contrast to createthe ashorter modernnovella) perspectivetry onto cope with the "totality of life".<ref>[[György Lukács|Georg Lukács]] separating [[drama]] from [[epic poetry|epic]], p. 46 of his ''The Theory of the Novel'': "Great epic writing gives form to the extensive totality of life, drama to the intensive totality of essence." The problem is, according to Lukács, that the ancient epic required a word view of equilibrium, coherence and unity, a sense the modern individual has lost. The novel becomes in this new situation the modern epic: "the forms of art [...] [39] carry the fragmentary nature of the world's structure into the world of forms". See Lucáks ''The Theory of the Novel. A historico-philosophical essay on the forms of great epic literature'' [first German edition 1920], transl. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1971).</ref> that separates the novel today from the shorter [[novella]] and the even shorter [[short story]] is new in history. 17th-century critics called for a genre that adopted the features of the short novella. This development led both the Spanish and the English markets to turn the word for the shorter genre into the central generic term. The 18th-century reevaluation of extended works eventually reintroduced features of the old romance with the paradoxical result that modern critics try to deny shorter works the right to be classified as novels. When [[Ian McEwan]]'s ''[[On Chesil Beach]]'' was listed for the [[Booker Prize]] in 2005, the resulting debate illustrated this point: a novel, said numerous critics, had to be longer; this was at best a novella.

17th-century critics had called for modern romances that adopted the features of the short novel. This development led both the Spanish and the English markets to turn the word for the shorter genre into the central generic term. The 18th-century reevaluation of extended works eventually reintroduced features of the old romance with the paradoxical result that modern criticism needed a new term for what had once been a novel. The lost synonym "novella" was eventually reintroduced to fill that gap. The separation of both genres remains a problem. When [[Ian McEwan]]'s ''[[On Chesil Beach]]'' was listed for the [[Booker Prize]] in 2005, critics stated, that it had to be longer, and that it was at best a novella. It is on the other hand difficult to call the 214 words work known as Snoopy's novel anything else. the little text's attempt to create a picture of life in its totality makes it a (parody of a) novel under the present package requirement of length and approach.<ref>See for [[Charles M. Schulz]]'comic strip first published on 12 July 1965 [http://www.daysofleisure.com/writing/the_complete_text_of_Snoopy_s_novel:.html this page]], the original illustration can be found [http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_0agwm6I7YZE/SLJnHXBhJHI/AAAAAAAAGEI/bHwl-YYSefY/s400/snoopy-freelance-writer.jpg&imgrefurl=http://nanowrimo-2008.blogspot.com/2008/08/snoopy-my-hero.html&usg=__jQ6NHQFhZJEkbGP3jEjinuQu-Yw=&h=110&w=400&sz=16&hl=en&start=145&um=1&tbnid=BKPC6MIq2jbfVM:&tbnh=34&tbnw=124&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dsnoopy%2Bnovel%26start%3D144%26ndsp%3D18%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN here]. See for an extended analysis the Wikipedia article on the first words [[It was a dark and stormy night]].</ref>

===Prose===