Analysis of Modern Novels

They are little new things, novelties, freshly minted diversions.

Despite the high example of novelists like Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf.

To consider the novel as an all-purpose medium catering for all strata of literacy.

To find a literary form that was anti-epic in both substance and language.

The events described are unheroic with settings in streets and taverns.

Don Quixote of Cervantes.

The novel is 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 as a continuum or cline, with some brief form like the anecdote at one end 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.

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.

The term 'novel' is a truncation of the Italian word 'novella' (from the plural of Latin 'novellus', a late variant of 'novus', meaning 'new'), so that what is now, in most languages, a diminutive denotes historically the parent form.

The novella was a kind of enlarged anecdote like those to be found in the 14th-century Italian classic Boccaccio's Decameron, each of which exemplifies the etymology of 'novella' well enough.