The term novel now refers to any extended narrative fiction in prose. The \Tshort story\t, which usually deals with fewer incidents and characters, is distinguished from the novel primarily by its length. The word novel is derived from the Italian novella, a compact prose tale somewhat longer than a short story. In many European countries, however, a novel is known as a roman, suggesting its connection with the older form \Tromance\t--a narrative of a more legendary, poetic nature. THE SCOPE OF THE NOVEL The novel evolved from a number of older forms of extended narrative. The most ancient of these, the \Tepic\t, was succeeded in the Middle Ages by the romance, which was at first a verse and later a prose form. Renaissance \Tverse\t \Tdrama\t, which represented a growing interest in the real world rather than an ideal, is also among the many antecedents of the novel--the most recent of literary forms to evolve and the most difficult to define strictly. The novel usually seeks to re-create everyday experience, to represent the world as it is rather than to evoke, like the romance, a legendary world. Generally bound by fact and probability, the novel seeks to convince its readers that its world is real, that it is a more accurate representation of reality than the ordinary person can perceive unaided. It is impossible to formulate an inclusive definition of the basic subject matter of the novel. A novel may be set within the human mind, in a visionary future state, on a ship or a battlefield, in an aristocratic drawing room or a hovel, in a parliament or a church, in a court of law or a hospital--the possibilities are legion. Furthermore, the novelist's view of the nature and fate of humanity may vary widely from book to book. A novel may be organized according to any one of an infinite variety of principles. It may concentrate on the development of character while virtually ignoring plot (see \Tnarrative and dramatic devices\t), as in some of the writings of James \TJoyce\t and William \TFaulkner\t. It may be very carefully plotted in order to imitate the classical structure of \Ttragedy\t, as in the novels of Thomas \THardy\t, or to sustain suspense by the gradual disclosure of information, as in the detective stories (see \Tmystery, suspense, and detective fiction\t) of Wilkie \TCollins\t. It may attempt a detailed portrayal of life and its shaping influences with the detached, objective perspective of science, as in the naturalistic novels of Emile \TZola\t, or use the weapon of \Tsatire\t in the hope of bringing about changes in society, as in the novels of Charles \TDickens\t. THE ORIGINS OF THE NOVEL Although the novel cannot be readily defined, its history can be studied. The earliest narrative prose fiction was probably Milesiaka, written by the Greek \TAristides\t in the 2d century BC--a series of tales of his home town. In Latin a number of works of prose fiction appeared, of which the most important were The \TGolden\t \Tass\t of \TApuleius\t, and the \TSatyricon\t of \TPetronius Arbiter\t, a satirical account of life at the time of the Roman emperor Nero. During the 3d century AD \TLongus\t wrote his Daphnis and Chloe (Eng. trans., 1587), a love story in Greek prose, and \THeliodorus of Emesa\t composed a long, realistic love story in prose called Aethiopica (trans. as Ethiopian Story, 1961). The Dark Ages made few significant contributions to the novel, although during the period before the blossoming of the arts in the Middle Ages a number of extended narratives were written, mostly accounts of the deeds of Charlemagne or Arthur (see \TArthur and Arthurian legend\t). With the appearance of the medieval romances and Italian novellas such as Giovanni \TBoccaccio\t's \TDecameron\t, formative influences on the modern novel had come into being. The link between the verse romance, or \Tfabliau\t, and more modern modes of narrative was the work of Geoffrey \TChaucer\t. Chaucer's verse displays unusual interest in character for its own sake and contains realistic observation of contemporary manners and morals comparable to that of some English novels of the 18th century. The earliest prose narratives that can be called novels in the modern sense of the word were \Lpicaresque novel\ls--sequences of episodic tales linked only by the presence of a central protagonist. The typical picaresque novel, which originated in 16th-century Spain, has as its central character a charming rascal who lives by his wits. It is realistic in manner, episodic in structure, and satiric in aim. The great example of this form is Miguel \TDe\t \TCervantes Saavedra\t'S DON QUIXOTE, a picaresque satire on the outmoded ideals of the chivalric romance. The central tradition of the English novel owes a great deal to works written to deflate romantic forms or idealized fictional personages. Picaresque satire is certainly the favorite mode of Henry \TFielding\t, whose earliest full-length novel, Joseph Andrews (1742), acknowledges the seminal influence of Cervantes. Other 17th- and early-18th-century influences--all of them French--on the English novel include the romances of Madeleine de \TScudery\t, Paul \TScarron\t's Le Roman Comique (The Comic Novel 1651-57), the Comtesse de \TLa Fayette\t's La Princesse de Cleves (1678), Jean de \TLa Fontaine\t's Fables (1668-94), Alain Rene \TLesage\t's Gil Blas (1715-35), Abbe \TPrevost\t's Manon Lescaut (1731), and Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de \TMarivaux\t's Marianne (1731-41). THE ENGLISH NOVEL The English novel was a product of several literary traditions, but above all it was quasi-dramatic in form and tragicomic in theme, reflecting the influence of Renaissance drama and especially that of William Shakespeare. John \TBunyan\t's Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680) is printed as though the dialogue were the text of a play; Samuel \TRichardson\t's Pamela is preceded by a list of characters. English writers of the 18th century, working in the tradition of classical literature, the romance, the picaresque tale, the novella, and such earlier prose models in English as John \TLyly\t's Euphues (1579), Sir Philip \TSidney\t's Arcadia (1590), Aphra \TBehn\t's Oroonoko (1688), and Bunyan's \TPilgrim's Progress\t, collectively discovered the form of the novel as it is known today. Daniel \TDefoe\t's Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders (1722) are picaresque novels with a convincingly realized protagonist who inhabits a solid, real world. These are the first novels of incident in English. The first novels of character are Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) and \TClarissa\t. Both are epistolary novels: the narrative consists entirely of an exchange of letters. In the novel of incident as written by Defoe, the reader's interest is primarily in the action--in what will happen next; in the novel of character it centers on the thoughts and fortunes of the characters. In the tradition of the Anglo-American novel it is the Richardsonian mode that is central, largely because of the richness of its psychological interest. The first great flowering of the English novel began in 1740 with Pamela and ended three decades later with the publication of Tobias \TSmollett\t's Humphrey Clinker and the death of Laurence \TSterne\t, author of \TTristram Shandy\t. Of the four leading novelists of these years the most enduringly popular was Henry Fielding. His masterpiece, \TTom Jones\t, appeared in 1749. Fielding's major contributions to the embryonic genre were to discard the epistolary device and fuse, within the picaresque form, the novel of incident and the novel of character, thus creating a new type of narrative fiction that elicits interest both in incident and in character. Fielding also articulated--in his preface to Joseph Andrews and in addresses to the reader in Tom Jones--the first coherent theory of the novel. Fielding claimed that the novel ought to be a "comic epic poem in prose." The comic epic, contended Fielding in the preface to Joseph Andrews, "differs from the serious romance in its fable and action, in this; that as in the one these are grave and solemn, so in the other they are light and ridiculous: it differs in its characters, by introducing persons of inferior rank, and consequently of inferior manners. . . . lastly, in its sentiments and diction; by preserving the ludicrous instead of the sublime." Fielding was also concerned with the moral effect of literature on its readers, feeling that fiction could best teach good morals by showing people what to shun rather than what to imitate; vice, being more interesting than virtue, is more likely to engage the attention of the average reader. After the deaths of Fielding, Richardson, Sterne and Smollett, only the work of Oliver \TGoldsmith\t, Fanny \TBurney\t, and Ann \TRadcliffe\t stands out from the mass of \LGothic romance\ls, trivial novels of manners, and theological treatises dressed up as fiction that dominated the literary marketplace. During the late 18th and the early 19th centuries another kind of fiction came into vogue, the novel of SENSIBILITY. It stressed the importance of emotional consciousness and cultivated the capacity to be moved by the pathetic. Morbid sensibility--stimulated for its own sake as an end in itself--was the logical result of such a development, and when Jane \TAusten\t wrote Sense and Sensibility (1811), it was in part to lampoon the cultivation of sentiment. THE 19TH-CENTURY ENGLISH, FRENCH, AND RUSSIAN NOVEL Jane Austen and Sir Walter \TScott\t were contemporaries, but the history of their literary reputations is an instructive lesson in the direction the novel has taken since their time. Until Charles Dickens began to write, Scott was the most popular novelist in the world, while Austen's novels remained obscure. He used the broad canvas of Scottish, English, and French history for his subject, while she focused on the restricted life of provincial towns and rural families. During the last hundred years, however, Scott's reputation has declined, whereas many regard Austen as the first modern novelist--that is, the first to write novels concerned not with incident but rather with the mental life and personal relations of ordinary human beings. Many of the most important novelists of the last hundred years--for example, Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner--wrote psychological novels in the tradition of Austen rather than novels of incident in the manner of Scott. Austen died at a time when the writers who made the 19th century throughout Europe into the golden age of the novel were just coming into existence. Dickens, William Makepeace \TThackeray\t, Anthony \TTrollope\t, Charlotte Bronte (see \TBronte\t family), and George \TEliot\t were all born within eight years of one another during the second decade of the century. Although some of these novelists were stern critics of their time, they also shared many of the fundamental beliefs of the society in which they lived. Despite their individuality, they were primarily novelists of manners, chroniclers of their era, and instinctive proponents of artistic realism. The later Victorian novelists--Samuel \TButler\t (1835-1902), George \TMeredith\t, Thomas Hardy, and George Robert \TGissing\t, for example--felt less comfortable with their time and its values and questioned many of the basic assumptions that their readers still took for granted. Hardy so outraged conventional opinion of his day as to impel a bishop to burn Jude the Obscure (1895); no such fate could have befallen a novel by Dickens, Trollope, or George Eliot. Identification with their time distinguishes the early Victorian novelists not only from their successors in England but also from many of their great European contemporaries. \TStendahl\t, Honore de \TBalzac\t, and Gustave \TFlaubert\t in France and Nikolai \TGogol\t, Ivan \TTurgenev\t, Fyodor Mikhailovich \TDostoyevsky\t, and Count Lee \TTolstoi\t in Russia were more radical and more skeptical of the inevitability of poetic justice for all. The writing careers of Stendahl and Balzac had already ended when Dickens and Thackeray reached the height of their fame and influence in the late 1840s. Turgenev's Sportman's Sketches, Tolstoi's Sevastopol, and Flaubert's Madame Bovary were all published in the 1850s, while Dostoyevsky's The House of the Dead and Crime and Punishment, Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, Tolstoi's The Cossacks and War and Peace, and Flaubert's Salammbo and Sentimental Education were all introduced in the 1860s. What is the relation of the English novelists of the 19th century to their European counterparts? Although the English were describers and interpreters of manners and morals, and sometimes preachers and reformers, they also saw themselves as public entertainers. Flaubert's desire "to write about ordinary life as histories and epics are written, yet without falsifying the subject," suggests the he took his medium more seriously. Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, with his questioning of humanity's relationship to God, and Tolstoi, with his desire to explain the forces of history, plainly saw the novel as a vehicle for speculation on metaphysical questions more readily than did their English contemporaries. Wilkie Collin's credo, "Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, make 'em wait," and Trollope's comparison of the novelist to a man making and selling shoes to specification indicate the difference between the Russian and the English viewpoint. In terms of technique, the work of George Eliot, even more than that of Dickens or Hardy, was of seminal importance in the 19th century. An admirer of Jane Austen, Eliot extended the psychological possibilities of the novel further than her predecessor. Eliot's novels had a profound influence on Henry James, who admired and imitated Eliot's psychological penetration while rejecting her assumption that fiction must teach morality by example, or, as Trollope put it, take the place of the preacher in the pulpit. Eliot responded to the European influences, but it was not until the 1880s, in the work of Meredith, Hardy, Gissing, and others, that continental fiction began to affect the English novel; by this time Zola had developed his influential theory of literary \Tnaturalism\t. The greatest of the novelists writing in English in the latter years of the 19th century, however, was neither English by birth nor a literary naturalist by inclination. By far the most important theoretician of the novel among 19th-century writers was the American-born Henry James. THE AMERICAN NOVEL The American novel had come into being during the later 18th and the early 19th centuries, in the tales of Charles Brockden \TBrown\t, the adventure stories of James Fenimore \TCooper\t, and the mysteries of Edgar Allan \TPoe\t. Cooper and Washington \TIrving\t were the first American writers to achieve an international reputation, but the American novel came to maturity in the mid-19th century. Nathaniel \THawthorne\t, the greatest American romancer, published The \TScarlet Letter\t in 1850, The \THouse of the Seven Gables\t in 1851, and The Blithedale Romance in 1852; Herman \TMelville\t, the greatest American allegorist, published his masterpiece, \TMoby-Dick\t, in 1851. In the latter half of the 19th century the American novel, as written by James, Mark \TTwain\t, William Dean \THowells\t, and Stephen \Tcrane\t, equaled the achievements of English and European fiction. Henry James Taking Balzac, Flaubert, and George Eliot as his literary models, and feeling that the United States offered too little cultural background and history for a writer to build on, James settled in England in the 1880s and lived there for the last 30 years of his life, producing several major novels. Ultimately following him into European exile, mostly for similar reasons, were such American writers as Edith \TWharton\t, Henry \TAdams\t, Gertrude \TStein\t, and T. S. \TEliot\t. No one could have been more attuned to the subtleties of the American character and American life than Twain, among whose many novels \TTom Sawyer\t and \THuckleberry Finn\t have attained classic status. Few novels could be more different from one another than James's Portrait and Twain's Huck Finn, written just a few years apart; yet each in its way exemplifies American realism, and both testify to the independence of American fiction from the European tradition. James's influence as novelist and critic is perhaps seen most clearly in the subtlety and care lavished upon the novelist's craft by such 20th-century writers as James Joyce, Thomas \TMann\t, Virginia \TWoolf\t, and William Faulkner. James's greatest interest was in "point of view" (see \Tnarrative and dramatic devices\t)--the perspective from which the novelist tells a story. Like Flaubert--the only other 19th-century novelist to write with depth and subtlety of the novel's theoretical concerns--James believed that the novelist should not obtrude into the narrative; that inconspicuousness would preserve the "air of reality." The novelist, James said, is not a romancer, as Hawthorne believed, but rather a historian, the biographer of his characters. To refer to other times, as in the historical novel, or to promulgate moral or social beliefs, preaching openly in the manner of Thackeray, Trollope, or George Eliot, is to remind the reader that the world of the novel is not the real world, and thus dispel the illusion of reality. The earliest criticism of the novel, that of the 18th century, concerned itself mainly with the moral implications of technique--with how to tell a story so that it would have the most salutary moral effect on its readers. Samuel Johnson felt that fiction ought to offer models of conduct. He was interested in art as a didactic medium and in the artist as instrument of moral instruction. Johnson may have disagreed with Fielding as to how art should teach morality, but they agreed that it must teach. Formal \Trealism\t--the attempt to transcribe real life--was seen in the 18th and well into the 19th centuries as a means to alert the reader to the moral value of experience. Most Victorian novelists did not substantially differ from their Augustan predecessors in their preoccupation with the pedagogical value of art. Even Hardy, so often at odds with his time and its habits of mind, felt that the "true object" of reading fiction "is a lesson in life, mental enlargement from elements essential to the narratives themselves and from the reflections they engender." Thus, before Flaubert's and James's theories took hold, the primary interest of novelists was in the relationship between reader and text--the nature of this relationship being determined by the capacity of the words to imitate life: the more realistic a novel, the greater its capacity for creating a spiritual effect. With the critical writings of Flaubert and James the theory of the novel--and thus the novel itself--began to take a different tack. The novelist, they believed, should not be partisan, didactic, or obtrusive. Art should be impersonal. Flaubert's great interest, like James's, was in style and form; for Flaubert a novel could be aesthetically great regardless of its subject matter. At the beginning of the second half of the 19th century the notion of literature as a representation of existing reality was first questioned. Instead, literature began to assume autonomy as a creation of the artist's consciousness--self-referring and self-sustaining--no longer an imitation of life but a substitute for it. THE MODERN NOVEL Modern novelists have generally been less concerned with moral purpose than with abstract qualities of composition. Literary realism has attempted to represent mental states rather than to imitate the exterior world. James, insisting on psychological analysis of characters through dramatic form, on avoiding philosophical partisanship, and on the unobtrusiveness of the writer, set the standards that many modern novelists have followed. Aesthetic problems have certainly been a main concern of many of the 20th century's most important novelists. Marcel \TProust\t, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and Albert \TCamus\t have indulged in technical experimentation, especially in the manipulation of time sequence, point of view, and the use of symbols. The \Tstream of consciousness\t \Tnovel\t, characteristic of the modern desire to probe the interior life of characters, is best exemplified by James Joyce's \TUlysses\t. It remains to be seen whether the narrative methods and subjects introduced to the novel since 1900 have made a permanent break with earlier traditions, or whether the enduring popularity of conventional realistic narratives will eventually result in fresh interpretations of older traditions. Although the novel is now the most widely read of all literary forms, a very small number of the thousands of novels printed in any year are of any literary merit. Many of the earliest prose fictions were stories of erotic adventure and most contemporary novels still are. The work of such masters of the 20th-century English and American novel as Elizabeth \TBowen\t, F. Scott FITZGERALD, E. M. \TForster\t, and Ernest \THemingway\t has had surprisingly little effect on the mainstream of popular fiction. The works of Cervantes, Richardson, and Dickens were best-sellers at the time of their first publication, but this is rarely true of innovative modern novels. Among contemporary American novelists, Saul \TBellow\t, John \TDos Passos\t, John \THawkes\t, Joseph \THeller\t, Norman \TMailer\t, Bernard \TMalamud\t, Thomas \TPynchon\t, and J. D. \TSalinger\t have reached wide audiences. Of these writers, however, only Mailer and Pynchon have made notable experiments with form, and one of the most popular modern novelists, Alesksandr \TSolzhenitsyn\t, uses conventional narrative techniques. The work of Flaubert and James modified tradition, but Proust and Joyce overthrew it. Since the publication of A la Recherche du temps perdu (1913-27) and Ulysses, enormous changes have taken place in narrative technique, and writers of experimental fiction have shown comparatively little interest in the material world. In the writing of Hermann \Tbroch\t, Michel \TButor\t, Albert Camus, Alain \TRobbe-Grillet\t, Franz \TKafka\t, Nathalie \TSarraute\t, Jean Paul \TSartre\t, and Virginia Woolf, reality is stylized or used merely as a setting for the novel's primary subject, which is the process of the individual consciousness. The passage of time has become, since the work of Proust, a major preoccupation of the novel. This ancient problem--the relation between fictional and real time--is at least as old as Tristram Shandy, but it is posed more urgently by Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain, and it continues to engage many contemporary writers, who can no longer display Henry Fielding's confidence in the novelist's capacity to invent reality and whose search for new forms of expression reflects their desire to use the novel as an epistemological instrument for investigating the nature of perception itself. John Halperin Bibliography: Allen, Walter, The English Novel (1954); Allott, Miriam, Novelists on the Novel (1959); Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis, trans. by Willard Trask (1946; repr. 1953); Brereton, Geoffrey, A Short History of French Literature (1954); Calvino, Italo, The Uses of Literature (1987); Dyson, A. E., ed., The English Novel: Select Bibliographical Guides (1974); Freeborn, Richard, The Rise of the Russian Novel (1973); Halperin, John, ed., The Theory of the Novel: New Essays (1974); Harvey, W. J., Character and the Novel (1965); Heiserman, Arthur, The Novel before the Novel (1978); Humphrey, Robert, Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (1954); James, Henry, The Art of the Novel, ed. by R. P. Blackmur (1934); Kundera, Milan, Art of the Novel (1987); Leary, Lewis, American Literature: A Study and Research Guide (1976); Leavis, Q. D., Fiction and the Reading Public (1932); Lukacs, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, trans. by Anna Bostock (1920; trans. 1971); Ortega y Gasset, Jose, The Dehumanization of Art, trans. by Helene Weyl (1925; trans. 1948; repr. 1968); Perry, Ben E., The Ancient Romances (1967); Rose, Ernst, A History of German Literature (1960); Scott, Paul, On Writing and the Novel (1987); Spiller, Robert E., et al., Literary History of the United States, 2 vols. and supplement, 3d ed. (1963); Watt, Ian, The Rise of the Novel (1957; repr. 1965).