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Portrait of Samuel Richardson by Joseph Highmore. National Portrait Gallery, Westminster, England.. The English novel is an important part of English literature.This article mainly concerns novels, written in English, by novelists who were born or have spent a significant part of their lives in England, Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland (or any part of Ireland before 1922).
Novel – a long, written narrative, normally in prose, which describes fictional characters and events, usually in the form of a sequential story. Novella – a written, fictional, prose narrative normally longer than a short story but shorter than a novel.
Literary historian Ian Watt, in The Rise of the Novel (1957), argued that the modern novel was born in the early 18th century. Recent technological developments have led to many novels also being published in non-print media: this includes audio books, web novels, and ebooks. Another non-traditional fiction format can be found in graphic novels.
A theme may be exemplified by the actions, utterances, or thoughts of a character in a novel. An example of this would be the thematic idea of loneliness in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, wherein many of the characters seem to be lonely. It may differ from the thesis—the text's or author's implied worldview. [4] [example needed]
A single part or division of a longer written work may also be called a book, especially for some works composed in antiquity: each part of Aristotle's Physics, for example, is a book. [5] It is difficult to create a precise definition of the book that clearly delineates it from other kinds of written material across time and culture.
The sometimes blurry definition between a novel and a novella can create controversy, as was the case with British writer Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach (2007). The author described it as a novella, but the panel for the Man Booker Prize in 2007 qualified the book as a "short novel". [23]
Realism was an important topic in these earlier studies that focused on the novel. For example, Ernest A. Baker's multivolume History of the English Novel extensively discussed realism. Other scholars — Frank Godfrey Singer (in 1933), Bruce McCullough (in 1946), Arnold Kettle (in 1951), and Diana Neill (in 1951) — also discussed how close ...
An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of letters between the fictional characters of a narrative. [1] The term is often extended to cover novels that intersperse documents of other kinds with the letters, most commonly diary entries and newspaper clippings, and sometimes considered to include novels composed of documents even if ...