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A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction usually written in prose and published as a book. The English word to describe such a work derives from the Italian: novella for "new", "news", or "short story (of something new)", itself from the Latin: novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of novellus, diminutive of novus, meaning "new". According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, Medieval Chivalric romance, and in the tradition of the Italian Renaissance novella. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, in the historical romances of Walter Scott and the Gothic novel. Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, and John Cowper Powys, preferred the term "romance". Such "romances" should not be confused with the genre fiction romance novel, which focuses on romantic love. M. H. Abrams and Walter Scott have argued that a novel is a fiction narrative that displays a realistic depiction of the state of a society, while the romance encompasses any fictitious narrative that emphasizes marvellous or uncommon incidents. Works of fiction that include marvellous or uncommon incidents are also novels, including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.

Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji, an early 11th-century Japanese text, has sometimes been described as the world's first novel, because of its early use of the experience of intimacy in a narrative form. There is considerable debate over this, however, as there were certainly long fictional prose works that preceded it. The spread of printed books in China led to the appearance of the vernacular classic Chinese novels during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), and Qing dynasty (1616–1911). An early example from Europe was Hayy ibn Yaqdhan by the Sufi writer Ibn Tufayl in Muslim Spain. Later developments occurred after the invention of the printing press. Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote (the first part of which was published in 1605), is frequently cited as the first significant European novelist of the modern era. 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. While these comic book versions of works of fiction have their origins in the 19th century, they have only become popular recently. (Full article...)

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Title page, illustrated 1893 edition of The Coral Island

The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean is an 1857 novel written by Scottish author R. M. Ballantyne. One of the first works of juvenile fiction to feature exclusively juvenile heroes, the story relates the adventures of three boys marooned on a South Pacific island, the only survivors of a shipwreck.

A typical Robinsonade – a genre of fiction inspired by Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe – and one of the most popular of its type, the book first went on sale in late 1857 and has never been out of print. Among the novel's major themes are the civilising effect of Christianity, 19th-century imperialism in the South Pacific, and the importance of hierarchy and leadership. It was the inspiration for William Golding's dystopian novel Lord of the Flies (1954), which inverted the morality of The Coral Island; in Ballantyne's story the children encounter evil, but in Lord of the Flies evil is within them. (Full article...)

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In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat.In the past, also, war was one of the main instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality. All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers, but they could not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency. So long as defeat meant the loss of independence, or some other result generally held to be undesirable, the precautions against defeat had to be serious. Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four. Inefficient nations were always conquered sooner or later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to illusions. Moreover, to be efficient it was necessary to be able to learn from the past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of what had happened in the past. Newspapers and history books were, of course, always coloured and biased, but falsification of the kind that is practiced today would have been impossible. War was a sure safeguard of sanity, and so far as the ruling classes were concerned it was probably the most important of all safeguards. While wars could be won or lost, no ruling class could be completely irresponsible.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

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Did you know...

...that Edgar Allan Poe satirized the concept of a self-made man in his story "The Business Man" using a character that makes his fortune cutting the tails off cats?
...that a description of the Battle of Aspern-Essling written by Patrick Rambaud as The Battle was originally a project of Honoré de Balzac?
...that the Iceberg Theory refers to Ernest Hemingway's (pictured) distinctive writing style?

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General images

The following are images from various novel-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1One of the most influential novels on the picaresque genre was The Golden Ass by Apuleius, which he published sometime in the 2nd century AD. (ms. Vat. Lat. 2194, Vatican Library) (1345 illustration). (from Picaresque novel)
Image 21915 novelization of the original 1904 play Peter and Wendy (from Novelization)
Image 3Paper as the essential carrier: Murasaki Shikibu writing her The Tale of Genji in the early 11th century, 17th-century depiction (from Novel)
Image 4Chinua Achebe, Buffalo, 2008 (from Novel)
Image 5Harlequin novels (from Romance novel)
Image 6Adventure novels and short stories were popular subjects for American pulp magazines. (from Adventure fiction)
Image 7The chapbook Jack the Giant Killer (from Chapbook)
Image 81474: The customer in the copyist's shop with a book he wants to have copied. This illustration of the first printed German Melusine looked back to the market of manuscripts. (from Novel)
Image 9A nineteenth-century painting by the Swiss-French painter Marc Gabriel Charles Gleyre depicting a scene from Longus's Daphnis and Chloe (from Romance novel)
Image 10The frontispiece of a late 18th-century chapbook edition of Voltaire's The Extraordinary Tragical Fate of Calas, depicting Jean Calas being broken on the wheel (from Chapbook)
Image 11Chaucer reciting Troilus and Criseyde: early-15th-century manuscript of the work at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (from Novel)
Image 12Madame de Pompadour spending her afternoon with a book (François Boucher, 1756) (from Novel)
Image 13A modern chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 14Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) (from Novel)
Image 15Richard Head, The English Rogue (1665) (from Novel)
Image 16A light novel bookstore in Macau (from Light novel)
Image 17Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladivostok, 1995 (from Novel)
Image 18J. K. Rowling, 2010 (from Novel)
Image 19First edition of Aleksis Kivi's The Seven Brothers (1870) (from Novel)
Image 20Image from a Victorian edition of Walter Scott's Waverley (1814) (from Novel)
Image 21"Oh Edward! How can you?", a late-19th-century illustration from Sense and Sensibility (1811) by Jane Austen, a pioneer of the genre (from Romance novel)
Image 22Novelization of chapter 8 of the film series Les Vampires (1915–16) (from Novelization)
Image 231719 newspaper reprint of Robinson Crusoe (from Novel)
Image 24Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1741) (from Novel)
Image 25Dan Brown (from Novel)
Image 26Statue of Ostap Bender in Elista (from Picaresque novel)
Image 27The picaresque genre began with the Spanish novel Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) (Pictured: Its title page) (from Picaresque novel)
Image 28Intimate short stories: The Court and City Vagaries (1711). (from Novel)
Image 29King Kong (1932) novelization of King Kong (1933) (from Novelization)
Image 30Woodcut of a fairy-circle from a 17th-century chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 31Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol.6, pp. 70–71 (1769) (from Novel)

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