ovel Home Literature Novels & Short Stories novel literature By Anthony Burgess • Edit History Top Questions What is a novel? What are the elements of a novel? What are the different types of novels?
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By Anthony Burgess • Edit History
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What is a novel?
What are the elements of a novel?
What are the different types of novels?
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Explore essential elements of the novel with Clifton Fadiman and actors
Explore essential elements of the novel with Clifton Fadiman and actors
Learn about essential elements of the novel—including mood, motivation, characterization, and style—with editor and anthologist Clifton Fadiman and actors from London's Old Vic theatre company. This is a 1962 production of Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
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novel, 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 persons in a specific setting. Within its broad framework, the genre of the novel has encompassed an extensive range of types and styles: picaresque, epistolary, Gothic, romantic, realist, historical—to name only some of the more important ones.
To the Lighthouse
To the Lighthouse
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Key People: Charles Dudley Warner Tom Lea Colson Whitehead Abdulrazak Gurnah Olga Tokarczuk
Related Topics: graphic novel picaresque novel Booker Prize epistolary novel psychological novel
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. The various forms that fiction may take are best seen less as a number of separate categories than as a continuum or, more accurately, a cline, with some such brief form as the anecdote at one end of the scale and the longest conceivable novel at the other. When any piece of fiction is long enough to constitute a whole book, as opposed to a mere part of a book, then it may be said to have achieved novelhood. But this state admits of its own quantitative categories, so that a relatively brief novel may be termed a novella (or, if the insubstantiality of the content matches its brevity, a novelette), and a very long novel may overflow the banks of a single volume and become a roman-fleuve, or river novel. Length is very much one of the dimensions of the genre