New novels in a Berlin bookshop, March 2009

A novel (from the Italian novella, Spanish novela, French nouvelle for "new", "news", or "short story of something new") is today a long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century.

The definition of the term in the last two or three centuries has usually embraced several other criteria. These include artistic merit, fictional content, a design to create an epic totality of life, and a focus on history and the individual. Critics and scholars have related the novel to several neighboring genres. On the one hand, it is related to public and private histories, such as the non-fiction memoir and the autobiography. On the other hand, the novel can be viewed as a form of art, to be evaluated critically in terms of the history of literature and calling for a specific sensitivity on the part of the reader to fully understand and properly appreciate it.

A "novel" is defined by a combination of its substance, its scope, its style, and that it can be located along a certain arc of the history of literature.

A fictional narrative

Fictionality and the presentation in a narrative are the two features most commonly invoked to distinguish novels from histories. In a historical perspective they are problematic criteria. Histories were supposed to be narrative projects throughout the early modern period. Their authors could include inventions as long as they were rooted in traditional knowledge or in order to orchestrate a certain passage. Historians would thus invent and compose speeches for didactic purposes. The 17th and 18th centuries developed new histories that rather discussed data. The novel inherited the traditional narrative project under the premise that there is an art of narratives to be developed. Histories are demanded to be true—they will otherwise be lies, crypto- and pseudohistories, historical forgeries. "Romances" and "novels" are by contrast demanded to be equally valuable whether they are invented or accurate depictions of personal or collective realities. A "deeper," "eternal" truth is supposed to mark the work of art, the good novel, in contrast to its cheap and trivial rival.

The narratives of novels are supposed to create suspense. Plots can develop other than expected, they can just as well unfold exactly as one had to fear; the suspense is then created in a process of identification. Novelists are supposed make their readers feel with the protagonists, where as historians are expected to create a distance between evaluations and data.

The public status of the narrative and its subject matter are important criteria differentiating histories from novels. Histories (officially) address a public of experts. Novels claim, by contrast, to make sense even if they find but a single private reader who enjoys the reading process. Early definitions of the genre tended to see the love plot as an essential feature: "I call them Fictions, to discriminate them from True Histories; and I add, of Love Adventures, because Love ought to be the Principal Subject of Romance, so Pierre Daniel Huet in 1670. Satirical fictions widened the range of subject matter in the 17th and 18th centuries. The intended private appeal remained the novel's most important criterion.