Main article: Philosophical fiction

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol.6, pp. 70–71 (1769)

The rising status of the novel in eighteenth century can be seen in the development
of philosophical[76] and experimental novels.

Philosophical fiction was not exactly new. Plato's dialogues were embedded in
fictional narratives and his Republic is an early example of a Utopia. Ibn Tufail's
12th century Philosophus Autodidacticus with its story of a human outcast surviving
on an island, and the 13th century response by Ibn al-Nafis, Theologus Autodidactus
are both didactic narrative works that can be thought of as early examples of a
philosophical[77] and a theological novel,[78] respectively.

The tradition of works of fiction that were also philosophical texts continued with
Thomas More's Utopia (1516) and Tommaso Campanella's City of the Sun (1602).
However, the actual tradition of the philosophical novel came into being in the
1740s with new editions of More's work under the title Utopia: or the happy
republic; a philosophical romance (1743).[citation needed] Voltaire wrote in this
genre in Micromegas: a comic romance, which is a biting satire on philosophy,
ignorance, and the self-conceit of mankind (1752, English 1753). His Zadig (1747)
and Candide (1759) became central texts of the French Enlightenment and of the
modern novel.[citation needed]

An example of the experimental novel is Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of
Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767), with its rejection of continuous narration.
[79] In it the author not only addresses readers in his preface but speaks directly
to them in his fictional narrative. In addition to Sterne's narrative experiments,
there are visual experiments, such as a marbled page, a black page to express
sorrow, and a page of lines to show the plot lines of the book. The novel as a
whole focuses on the problems of language, with constant regard to John Locke's
theories in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.[80]

The romance genre in the 18th century

Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1741)

The rise of the word "novel" at the cost of its rival, the romance, remained a
Spanish and English phenomenon, and though readers all over Western Europe had
welcomed the novel(la) or short history as an alternative in the second half of the
17th century, only the English and the Spanish had openly discredited the romance.
[citation needed]

But the change of taste was brief and Fénelon's Telemachus [Les Aventures de
Télémaque] (1699/1700) already exploited a nostalgia for the old romances with
their heroism and professed virtue. Jane Barker explicitly advertised her Exilius
as "A new Romance", "written after the Manner of Telemachus", in 1715.[81] Robinson
Crusoe spoke of his own story as a "romance", though in the preface to the third
volume, published in 1720, Defoe attacks all who said "that [...] the Story is
feign'd, that the Names are borrow'd, and that it is all a Romance; that there
never were any such Man or Place".

The late 18th century brought an answer with the Romantic Movement's readiness to
reclaim the word romance, with the gothic romance, and the historical novels of
Walter Scott. Robinson Crusoe now became a "novel" in this period, that is a work
of the new realistic fiction created in the 18th century.[citation needed]

The sentimental novel

Main article: Sentimental novel
Sentimental novels relied on emotional responses, and feature scenes of distress
and tenderness, and the plot is arranged to advance emotions rather than action.
The result is a valorization of "fine feeling", displaying the characters as models
of refined, sensitive emotional affect. The ability to display such feelings was
thought at this time to show character and experience, and to help shape positive
social life and relationships.[82]

An example of this genre is Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740),

composed "to cultivate the Principles of Virtue and Religion in the Minds of the
Youth of Both Sexes", which focuses on a potential victim, a heroine that has all
the modern virtues and who is vulnerable because her low social status and her
occupation as servant of a libertine who falls in love with her. She, however, ends
in reforming her antagonist.[citation needed]

Male heroes adopted the new sentimental character traits in the 1760s. Laurence
Sterne's Yorick, the hero of the Sentimental Journey (1768) did so with an enormous
amount of humour. Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield (1766) and Henry
Mackenzie's Man of Feeling (1771) produced the far more serious role models.
[citation needed]

These works inspired a sub- and counterculture of pornographic novels, for which
Greek and Latin authors in translations had provided elegant models from the last
century.[83] Pornography includes John Cleland's Fanny Hill (1748), which offered
an almost exact reversal of the plot of novels that emphasise virtue. The
prostitute Fanny Hill learns to enjoy her work and establishes herself as a free
and economically independent individual, in editions one could only expect to buy
under the counter.[84]

Less virtuous protagonists can also be found in satirical novels, like Richard
Head's English Rogue (1665), that feature brothels, while women authors like Aphra
Behn had offered their heroines alternative careers as precursors of the 19th-
century femmes fatales.[85]

The genre evolves in the 1770s with, for example, Werther in Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) realising that it is impossible for
him to integrate into the new conformist society, and Pierre Choderlos de Laclos in
Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) showing a group of aristocrats playing games of
intrigue and amorality.[citation needed].

The social context of the 18th century novel

Changing cultural status
By around 1700, fiction was no longer a predominantly aristocratic entertainment,
and printed books had soon gained the power to reach readers of almost all classes,
though the reading habits differed and to follow fashions remained a privilege.
Spain was a trendsetter into the 1630s but French authors superseded Cervantes, de
Quevedo, and Alemán in the 1640s. As Huet was to note in 1670, the change was one
of manners.[86] The new French works taught a new, on the surface freer, gallant
exchange between the sexes as the essence of life at the French court.

The situation changed again from 1660s into the 1690s when works by French authors
were published in Holland out of the reach of French censors.[87] Dutch publishing
houses pirated fashionable books from France and created a new market of political
and scandalous fiction. This led to a market of European rather than French
fashions in the early 18th century.[88]

Intimate short stories: The Court and City Vagaries (1711).

By the 1680s fashionable political European novels had inspired a second wave of
private scandalous publications and generated new productions of local importance.
Women authors reported on politics and on their private love affairs in The Hague
and in London. German students imitated them to boast of their private amours in
fiction.[89] The London, the anonymous international market of the Netherlands,
publishers in Hamburg and Leipzig generated new public spheres.[90] Once private
individuals, such as students in university towns and daughters of London's upper
class began to write novels based on questionable reputations, the public began to
call for a reformation of manners.[91]

An important development in Britain, at the beginning of the century, was that new
journals like The Spectator and The Tatler reviewed novels. In Germany Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing's Briefe, die neuste Literatur betreffend (1758) appeared in the
middle of the century with reviews of art and fiction. By the 1780s such reviews
played had an important role in introducing new works of fiction to the public.

Influenced by the new journals, reform became the main goal of the second
generation of eighteenth century novelists. The Spectator Number 10 had stated that
the aim was now "to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality […]
to bring philosophy out of the closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to
dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffeehouses"). Constructive
criticism of novels had until then been rare.[92] The first treatise on the history
of the novel was a preface to Marie de La Fayette's novel Zayde (1670).

A much later development was the introduction of novels into school and later
university curricula.[when?]

The acceptance of novels as literature

The French churchman and scholar Pierre Daniel Huet's Traitté de l'origine des
romans (1670) laid the ground for a greater acceptance of the novel as literature,
that is comparable to the classics, in the early 18th century. The theologian had
not only dared to praise fictions, but he had also explained techniques of
theological interpretation of fiction, which was a novelty. Furthermore, readers of
novels and romances could gain insight not only into their own culture, but also
that of distant, exotic countries.[citation needed]

When the decades around 1700 saw the appearance of new editions of the classical
authors Petronius, Lucian, and Heliodorus of Emesa.[93] the publishers equipped
them with prefaces that referred to Huet's treatise and the canon it had
established. Also exotic works of Middle Eastern fiction entered the market that
gave insight into Islamic culture. The Book of One Thousand and One Nights was
first published in Europe from 1704 to 1715 in French, and then translated
immediately into English and German, and was seen as a contribution to Huet's
history of romances.[94]

The English, Select Collection of Novels in six volumes (1720–22), is a milestone

in this development of the novel's prestige. It included Huet's Treatise, along
with the European tradition of the modern novel of the day: that is, novella from
Machiavelli's to Marie de La Fayette's masterpieces. Aphra Behn's novels had
appeared in the 1680s but became classics when reprinted in collections. Fénelon's
Telemachus (1699/1700) became a classic three years after its publication. New
authors entering the market were now ready to use their personal names rather than
pseudonyms, including Eliza Haywood, who in 1719 following in the footsteps of
Aphra Behn used her name with unprecedented pride.

19th-century novels
Romanticism
Main article: Romanticism
See also: Newgate novel

Image from a Victorian edition of Walter Scott's Waverley (1814)

The very word romanticism is connected to the idea of romance, and the romance
genre experienced a revival, at the end of the 18th century, with gothic fiction,
that began in 1764 with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, subtitled (in its
second edition) "A Gothic Story".[95] Subsequent important gothic works are Ann
Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and 'Monk' Lewis's The Monk (1796).

First edition of Aleksis Kivi's The Seven Brothers (1870)

The new romances challenged the idea that the novel involved a realistic depiction
of life, and destabilized the difference the critics had been trying to establish,
between serious classical art and popular fiction. Gothic romances exploited the
grotesque,[96] and some critics thought that their subject matter deserved less
credit than the worst medieval tales of Arthurian knighthood.[97]

The authors of this new type of fiction were accused of exploiting all available
topics to thrill, arouse, or horrify their audience. These new romantic novelists,
however, claimed that they were exploring the entire realm of fictionality. And
psychological interpreters, in the early 19th century, read these works as
encounters with the deeper hidden truth of the human imagination: this included
sexuality, anxieties, and insatiable desires. Under such readings, novels were
described as exploring deeper human motives, and it was suggested that such
artistic freedom would reveal what had not previously been openly visible.

The romances of de Sade, Les 120 Journées de Sodome (1785), Poe's Tales of the
Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818), and E.T.A.
Hoffmann, Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815), would later attract 20th-century
psychoanalysts and supply the images for 20th- and 21st-century horror films, love
romances, fantasy novels, role-playing computer games, and the surrealists.

The historical romance was also important at this time. But, while earlier writers
of these romances paid little attention to historical reality, Walter Scott's
historical novel Waverley (1814) broke with this tradition, and he invented "the
true historical novel".[98] At the same time he was influenced by gothic romance,
and had collaborated in 1801 with 'Monk' Lewis on Tales of Wonder.[98] With his
Waverley novels Scott "hoped to do for the Scottish border" what Goethe and other
German poets "had done for the Middle Ages, "and make its past live again in modern
romance".[99] Scott's novels "are in the mode he himself defined as romance, 'the
interest of which turns upon marvelous and uncommon incidents'".[100] He used his
imagination to re-evaluate history by rendering things, incidents and protagonists
in the way only the novelist could do. His work remained historical fiction, yet it
questioned existing historical perceptions. The use of historical research was an
important tool: Scott, the novelist, resorted to documentary sources as any
historian would have done, but as a romantic he gave his subject a deeper
imaginative and emotional significance.[100] By combining research with "marvelous
and uncommon incidents", Scott attracted a far wider market than any historian
could, and was the most famous novelist of his generation, throughout Europe.[98]

The Victorian period: 1837–1901

Main articles: French literature of the 19th century and Victorian literature
See also: Sensation novel
In the 19th century, the relationship between authors, publishers, and readers
changed. Authors originally had only received payment for their manuscript,
however, changes in copyright laws, which began in the 18th and continued into the
19th century[101] promised royalties on all future editions. Another change in the
19th century was that novelists began to read their works in theaters, halls, and
bookshops.[102] Also during the nineteenth century the market for popular fiction
grew, and competed with works of literature. New institutions like the circulating
library created a new market with a mass reading public.[103]

Another difference was that novels began to deal with more difficult subjects,
including current political and social issues, that were being discussed in
newspapers and magazines. Under the influence of social critics like Thomas
Carlyle,[104] the idea of social responsibility became a key subject, whether of
the citizen, or of the artist, with the theoretical debate concentrating on
questions around the moral soundness of the modern novel.[105] Questions about
artistic integrity, as well as aesthetics, including the idea of "art for art's
sake", proposed by writers like Oscar Wilde and Algernon Charles Swinburne, were
also important.[106]

Major British writers such as Charles Dickens[107] and Thomas Hardy[108] were
influenced by the romance genre tradition of the novel, which had been revitalized
during the Romantic period. The Brontë sisters were notable mid-19th-century
authors in this tradition, with Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,
Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.[109] Publishing
at the very end of the 19th century, Joseph Conrad has been called "a supreme
'romancer.'"[110] In America "the romance ... proved to be a serious, flexible, and
successful medium for the exploration of philosophical ideas and attitudes."
Notable examples include Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and Herman
Melville's Moby-Dick.[111]

A number of European novelists were similarly influenced during this period by the
earlier romance tradition, along with the Romanticism, including Victor Hugo, with
novels like The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) and Les Misérables (1862), and
Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov with A Hero of Our Time (1840).

Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)

Many 19th-century authors dealt with significant social matters.[112] Émile Zola's
novels depicted the world of the working classes, which Marx and Engels's non-
fiction explores. In the United States slavery and racism became topics of far
broader public debate thanks to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852),
which dramatizes topics that had previously been discussed mainly in the abstract.
Charles Dickens' novels led his readers into contemporary workhouses, and provided
first-hand accounts of child labor. The treatment of the subject of war changed
with Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (1868/69), where he questions the facts provided
by historians. Similarly the treatment of crime is very different in Fyodor
Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866), where the point of view is that of a
criminal. Women authors had dominated fiction from the 1640s into the early 18th
century, but few before George Eliot so openly questioned the role, education, and
status of women in society, as she did.

As the novel became a platform of modern debate, national literatures were

developed that link the present with the past in the form of the historical novel.
Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed (1827) did this for Italy, while novelists in
Russia and the surrounding Slavonic countries, as well as Scandinavia, did
likewise.

Along with this new appreciation of history, the future also became a topic for
fiction. This had been done earlier in works like Samuel Madden's Memoirs of the
Twentieth Century (1733) and Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826), a work whose plot
culminated in the catastrophic last days of a mankind extinguished by the plague.
Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1887) and H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895)
were concerned with technological and biological developments. Industrialization,
Darwin's theory of evolution and Marx's theory of class divisions shaped these
works and turned historical processes into a subject of wide debate. Bellamy's
Looking Backward became the second best-selling book of the 19th century after
Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.[113][114] Such works led to the
development of a whole genre of popular science fiction as the 20th century
approached.
20th century
See also: Modernism, Postmodernism, Antinovel, and Nouveau roman
Modernism and post-modernism

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladivostok, 1995

James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) had a major influence on modern novelists, in the way
that it replaced the 18th- and 19th-century narrator with a text that attempted to
record inner thoughts, or a "stream of consciousness". This term was first used by
William James in 1890 and, along with the related term interior monologue, is used
by modernists like Dorothy Richardson, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and William
Faulkner.[115] Also in the 1920s expressionist Alfred Döblin went in a different
direction with Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), where interspersed non-fictional text
fragments exist alongside the fictional material to create another new form of
realism, which differs from that of stream-of-consciousness.

Later works like Samuel Beckett's trilogy Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951) and The
Unnamable (1953), as well as Julio Cortázar's Rayuela (1963) and Thomas Pynchon's
Gravity's Rainbow (1973) all make use of the stream-of-consciousness technique. On
the other hand, Robert Coover is an example of those authors who, in the 1960s,
fragmented their stories and challenged time and sequentiality as fundamental
structural concepts.

Chinua Achebe, Buffalo, 2008

The 20th century novel deals with a wide range of subject matter. Erich Maria
Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1928) focuses on a young German's
experiences of World War I. The Jazz Age is explored by American F. Scott
Fitzgerald, and the Great Depression by fellow American John Steinbeck.
Totalitarianism is the subject of British writer George Orwell's most famous
novels. Existentialism is the focus of two writers from France: Jean-Paul Sartre
with Nausea (1938) and Albert Camus with The Stranger (1942). The counterculture of
the 1960s, with its exploration of altered states of consciousness, led to revived
interest in the mystical works of Hermann Hesse, such as Steppenwolf (1927), and
produced iconic works of its own, for example Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the
Cuckoo's Nest and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Novelists have also been
interested in the subject of racial and gender identity in recent decades.[116]
Jesse Kavadlo of Maryville University of St. Louis has described Chuck Palahniuk's
Fight Club (1996) as "a closeted feminist critique".[117] Virginia Woolf, Simone de
Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, Elfriede Jelinek were feminist voices during this period.
Furthermore, the major political and military confrontations of the 20th and 21st
centuries have also influenced novelists. The events of World War II, from a German
perspective, are dealt with by Günter Grass' The Tin Drum (1959) and an American by
Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961). The subsequent Cold War influenced popular spy
novels. Latin American self-awareness in the wake of the leftist revolutions of the
1960s and 1970s resulted in a "Latin American Boom", linked to the names of
novelists Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García
Márquez, along with the invention of a special brand of postmodern magic realism.

Another major 20th-century social event, the so-called sexual revolution is

reflected in the modern novel.[118] D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover had to
be published in Italy in 1928 with British censorship only lifting its ban as late
as 1960. Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1934) created a comparable US scandal.
Transgressive fiction from Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955) to Michel Houellebecq's
Les Particules élémentaires (1998) pushed the boundaries, leading to the mainstream
publication of explicitly erotic works such as Anne Desclos' Story of O (1954) and
Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus (1978).

In the second half of the 20th century, Postmodern authors subverted serious debate
with playfulness, claiming that art could never be original, that it always plays
with existing materials.[119] The idea that language is self-referential was
already an accepted truth in the world of pulp fiction. A postmodernist re-reads
popular literature as an essential cultural production. Novels from Thomas
Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), to Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (1980)
and Foucault's Pendulum (1989) made use of intertextual references.[120]

Genre fiction
icon
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Main article: Genre fiction
See also: Thriller, Western, and Speculative fiction
While the reader of so-called serious literature will follow public discussions of
novels, popular fiction production employs more direct and short-term marketing
strategies by openly declaring a work's genre. Popular novels are based entirely on
the expectations for the particular genre, and this includes the creation of a
series of novels with an identifiable brand name. e.g. the Sherlock Holmes series
by Arthur Conan Doyle.

Popular literature holds a larger market share. Romance fiction had an estimated
$1.375 billion share in the US book market in 2007. Inspirational
literature/religious literature followed with $819 million, science fiction/fantasy
with $700 million, mystery with $650 million and then classic literary fiction with
$466 million.[121]

Dan Brown
Genre literature might be seen as the successor of the early modern chapbook. Both
fields share a focus on readers who are in search of accessible reading
satisfaction.[122] The twentieth century love romance is a successor of the novels
Madeleine de Scudéry, Marie de La Fayette, Aphra Behn, and Eliza Haywood wrote from
the 1640s into the 1740s. The modern adventure novel goes back to Daniel Defoe's
Robinson Crusoe (1719) and its immediate successors. Modern pornography has no
precedent in the chapbook market but originates in libertine and hedonistic belles
lettres, of works like John Cleland's Fanny Hill (1749) and similar eighteenth
century novels. Ian Fleming's James Bond is a descendant of the anonymous yet
extremely sophisticated and stylish narrator who mixed his love affairs with his
political missions in La Guerre d'Espagne (1707). Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists
of Avalon is influenced by Tolkien, as well as Arthurian literature, including its
nineteenth century successors. Modern horror fiction also has no precedent on the
market of chapbooks but goes back to the elitist market of early nineteenth century
Romantic literature. Modern popular science fiction has an even shorter history,
from the 1860s.

The authors of popular fiction tend to advertise that they have exploited a
controversial topic and this is a major difference between them and so-called
elitist literature. Dan Brown, for example, discusses, on his website, the question
whether his Da Vinci Code is an anti-Christian novel.[123] And because authors of
popular fiction have a fan community to serve, they can risk offending literary
critics. However, the boundaries between popular and serious literature have
blurred in recent years, with postmodernism and poststructuralism, as well as by
adaptation of popular literary classics by the film and television industries.

J. K. Rowling, 2010
Crime became a major subject of 20th and 21st century genre novelists and crime
fiction reflects the realities of modern industrialized societies. Crime is both a
personal and public subject: criminals each have their personal motivations;
detectives, see their moral codes challenged. Patricia Highsmith's thrillers became
a medium of new psychological explorations. Paul Auster's New York Trilogy (1985–
1986) is an example of experimental postmodernist literature based on this genre.

Fantasy is another major area of commercial fiction, and a major example is J. R.

R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (1954/55), a work originally written for young
readers that became a major cultural artefact. Tolkien in fact revived the
tradition of European epic literature in the tradition of Beowulf, the North
Germanic Edda and the Arthurian Cycles.

Science fiction is another important type of genre fiction and has developed in a
variety of ways, ranging from the early, technological adventure Jules Verne had
made fashionable in the 1860s, to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) about
Western consumerism and technology. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
deals with totalitarianism and surveillance, among other matters, while Stanisław
Lem, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke produced modern classics which focus on the
interaction between humans and machines. The surreal novels of Philip K Dick such
as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch explore the nature of reality, reflecting
the widespread recreational experimentation with drugs and cold-war paranoia of the
60's and 70's. Writers such as Ursula le Guin and Margaret Atwood explore feminist
and broader social issues in their works. William Gibson, author of the cult
classic Neuromancer (1984), is one of a new wave of authors who explore post-
apocalyptic fantasies and virtual reality.

21st century
Non-traditional formats
See also: Cell phone novel, Visual novel, Hypertext fiction, and Interactive
fiction
A major development in this century has been novels published as ebooks, and the
growth of web fiction, which is available primarily or solely on the Internet. A
common type is the web serial: unlike most modern novels, web fiction novels are
frequently published in parts over time. Ebooks are often published with a paper
version. Audio books (a recording of a book reading) have also become common this
century.

Another non-traditional format, popular in the 21st century, is the graphic novel.
However, though a graphic novel may be "a fictional story that is presented in
comic-strip format and published as a book",[124] the term can also refer to non-
fiction and collections of short works.[125][126] While the term graphic novel was
coined in the 1960s[127][128] there were precursors in the 19th century.[129] The
author John Updike, when he spoke to the Bristol Literary Society in 1969, on "the
death of the novel", declared that he saw "no intrinsic reason why a doubly
talented artist might not arise and create a comic strip novel masterpiece".[130] A
popular Japanese version of the graphic novel can be found in manga, and such works
of fiction can be published in online versions.

Audiobooks have been available since the 1930s in schools and public libraries, and
to a lesser extent in music shops. Since the 1980s this medium has become more
widely available, including more recently online.[131]

Web fiction is especially popular in China, with revenues topping US$2.5 billion,
[132] as well as in South Korea. Online literature such as web fiction inside China
has over 500 million readers,[133] therefore, online literature in China plays a
much more important role than in the United States and the rest of the world.[134]
Most books are available online, where the most popular novels find millions of
readers. Joara is S. Korea's largest web novel platform with 140,000 writers, with
an average of 2,400 serials per day and 420,000 works. The company posted 12.5
billion won in sales in 2015 as profits were generated from 2009. Its membership is
1.1 million, and it uses 8.6 million cases a day on average (2016).[135] Since
Joara's users have almost the same gender ratio, both fantasy and romance forms of
genre fiction are in high demand.[136]

The development of ebooks and web novels has led to a rapid expansion of self-
published works in recent years.[137] Some authors who self-publish can make more
money than through a traditional publisher.[138] However, despite the challenges
from digital media print remains "the most popular book format among U.S.
consumers, with more than 60 percent of adults having read a print book in the last
twelve months" (in September 2021).[139]

See also
icon Novels portal
Bengali novels
Chain novel
Children's literature
Collage novel
Gay literature
Graphic novel
Light novel
Nautical fiction
Novel in Scotland
Proletarian novel
Psychological novel
Sociology of literature
Social novel
The True Story of the Novel
Visual novel
War novel
Web novel
Young adult fiction
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Gall Harpham, Wadsworth Cengage Learning, Boston, 2009, p. 226.
Britannica Online Encyclopedia [1] accessed 2 August 2009
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University Press, 1996, rept. 1997, p. 1. Retrieved 25 April 2014.
J. A. Cuddon, Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory, ed., 4th edition,
revised C. E. Preston. London: Penguin, 1999, pp. 76o-2.
The Scarlet Letter: A Romance
Melville described Moby Dick to his English publisher as "a romance of adventure,
founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries," and
promised it would be done by the fall. Herman Melville in Horth, Lynn, ed. (1993).
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William Harmon & C, Hugh Holmam, A Handbook to Literature (7th edition), p. 237.
See A Glastonbury Romance.
"To Kill a Mockingbird voted greatest novel of all time". The Daily Telegraph. 16
June 2008. Archived from the original on 2022-01-11.
Moraru, Christian (1997). "From Gnosticism to "Containment": The American Novel in
the Age of Suspicion". Studies in the Novel. 29 (4): 561–567. JSTOR 29533235.
M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms (7th edition), p. 192.
"Essay on Romance", Prose Works volume vi, p. 129, quoted in "Introduction" to
Walter Scott's Quentin Durward, ed. Susan Maning. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1992, p. xxv.
See also, Nathaniel Hawthorne's, "Preface" to The House of Seven Gables: A
Romance, 1851. External link to the "Preface" below)
"The 100 best novels: No 8 – Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)". The Guardian.
11 November 2013.
Grossman, Lev (8 January 2010). "All-TIME 100 Novels". Time.
"Hayy ibn Yaqzan | [Link]". [Link]. Retrieved 2020-05-02.
Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature. Kathleen Kuiper, ed. 1995. Merriam-
Webster, Springfield, Mass.
Peraldo, Emmanuelle (2020-03-10). 300 Years of Robinsonades. Cambridge Scholars
Publishing. p. 4. ISBN 978-1-5275-4840-4. Retrieved 2025-08-06. And it is precisely
the middle class that Ian Watt (1957) considers as a defining characteristic of the
emerging genre of the novel: Watt sees the novel as a genre that developed in the
social context of the rise of the Middle Class in England in the first half of the
eighteenth century and Defoe has been considered by many critics, including Watt,
as one of the fathers of the novel. In The Rise of the Novel; Studies in Defoe,
Richardson and Fielding (whose subtitle clearly mentions Defoe as an actor in the
rise of the genre), lan Watt wrote that "Robinson Crusoe is certainly the first
novel in the sense that it is the first fictional narrative in which an ordinary
person's daily activities are the center of continuous literary attention." (Watt
1957, 74) There have been disagreements on that issue, and some critics have voiced
their hesitations on Robinson Crusoe as the first novel, in Reconsidering the Rise
of the Novel (2000) for example. As for Defoe himself, he would never have called
his writings "novels" and the "novel" is a label that was given by critics later in
the eighteenth century.
Doody (1996), pp. 18–3, 187.
Doody (1996), p. 187.
Bloom, Harold (2002). Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds.
Fourth Estate. p. 294. ISBN 978-1-84115-398-8. Retrieved 19 December 2021.
György Lukács The Theory of the Novel. A historico-philosophical essay on the
forms of great epic literature [first German edition 1920], transl. by Anna Bostock
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1971).
সহপাঠ [Co-lesson] (in Bengali). Vol. Classes XI-XII and Alim. National Curriculum
and Textbook Board, Dhaka, Bangladesh. October 2023. p. 2.
Artistic and Architectural Index—An archive of the Internet Archive of Fiction,
archived on 2011-11-24
Đỗ Thu Hiền (2021) Definition of novel, biography and narrative prose in medieval
Vietnam. Journal of Literature Researches, No. 6. In Vietnamese
Trần Nghĩa, Hán-Nôm Journal Issue 3 (32), 1997, Classification of Vietnamese novel
in Hán script (in Vietnamese)
Lê Thanh Sơn. Modernization tendency in Tản Đà's literature works, from the
categorization aspecy UED Journal of Social Sciences, Humanities & Education, 2020
(in Vietnamese)
ONLINE, TUOI TRE (March 21, 2008). "Lý Lan và chuyện 'bé mọn' của thế giới đàn
bà". TUOI TRE ONLINE.
"Nhận thức thể loại của nhà văn Nam Bộ giai đoạn 1945 – 1954".
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송민호 (February 28, 2018). "'소설'의 임계 — '장편소설(掌篇小說)'이라는 관념과 양식적 규정이라는 문제" [The Border
of a ‘Novel’: On the Concept of the ‘Jangpyun Novel’ (‘Novel the Size of a Palm of
a Hand’) and the Problem of Style Regulation]. 인문논총 [Journal of Humanities]. 75
(1). 서울대학교 인문학연구원: 325. Retrieved 2025-05-26.
"소설[小說]" [novel]. Doopedia. Retrieved 2025-05-26.
"장편 소설 1(長篇小說)" [full-length novel]. Standard Korean Language Dictionary.
Retrieved 2025-05-26.
"장편 소설 (長篇小說)" [full-length novel]. National Institute of Korean Language's
Korean-English Learners' Dictionary. Retrieved 2025-05-26.
"중편 소설(中篇小說)" [midlength novel]. Standard Korean Language Dictionary. Retrieved
2025-05-26.
"단편 소설(短篇小說)" [short novel]. Standard Korean Language Dictionary. Retrieved 2025-
05-26.
"단편 소설(短篇小說)" [short novel]. National Institute of Korean Language's Korean-
English Learners' Dictionary. Retrieved 2025-05-26.
"콩트 1(conte)" [very short novel]. Standard Korean Language Dictionary. Retrieved
2025-05-26.
"소설[小說]" [novel]. Doopedia. Retrieved 2025-05-26.
"장편 소설 2(掌篇小說)" [a novel the size of a palm of a hand]. Standard Korean Language
Dictionary. Retrieved 2025-05-26.
"엽편 소설(葉篇小說)" [a novel the size of a tree leaf]. Standard Korean Language
Dictionary. Retrieved 2025-05-26.
"소설[小說]" [novel]. Doopedia. Retrieved 2025-05-26.
Morgan, J. R. (2019). "Foreword to the 2008 edition". In Reardon, B. P. (ed.).
Collected Ancient Greek Novels (3rd ed.). Oakland, CA: University of California
Press. p. xvi. ISBN 978-0-520-30559-5.
John Robert Morgan, Richard Stoneman, Greek fiction: the Greek novel in context
(Routledge, 1994), Gareth L. Schmeling, and Tim Whitmarsh (hrsg.) The Cambridge
companion to the Greek and Roman novel (Cambridge University Press 2008).
"Sanskrit Dramas – Asian Traditional Theatre & Dance".
朴銀美, パクギンミ. 研究発表 『伊勢物語』 の構想とその世界―『遊仙窟』 と 『崔致遠伝』 との比較を通して―. In 国際日本文学研究集会会議録 1999
Oct 1 (No. 22, pp. 9-32). 国文学研究資料館 (in Japanese). ("第一に,唐代最初であり,最古の恋愛小説であった『遊仙窟』")
("First, "Youxianku", the oldest romance novel from the Tang dynasty.")
"中国・唐の伝奇小説「遊仙窟」 最古の写本、99 年かけて後半発見". The Asahi Shimbun (in Japanese). 18 August
2022. (translation): The Chinese Tang dynasty novel "Yusenkutsu" [You Xian Ku] is
said to be the first novel to come to Japan. In the oldest surviving manuscript at
Kongoji Temple in Kawachi Nagano City, Osaka Prefecture, the second half of the
manuscript, which was previously missing, has been found. ... "Yusenkutsu" is the
work of Zhang Wencheng. It is said to have been introduced to Japan during the Nara
period. ... It is also characterized by its fluent writing style, witty dialogue
and poetry, and Tomohide Uesugi, a researcher at the Kyoto National Museum
(Higashiyama-ku, Kyoto), who discovered the missing parts, said, "Nowadays, it can
be considered as a cutting-edge foreign drama, known for its famous writing, and
has influenced the Man'yōshū and The Tale of Genji, and has been read in Japan for
a long time".
"Printing press | History & Types". 10 September 2024.
"Chivalric romance", in Chris Baldick, ed., Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms,
3rd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2008).
See William Caxton's preface to his 1485 edition.
C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, p. 9 ISBN 0-521-47735-2
The ESTC notes 29 editions published between 1496 and 1785 ESTC search result
Archived 2016-01-28 at the Wayback Machine
"Chapbooks: Definition and Origins". Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Retrieved 19 April 2015.
From chapmen, chap, a variety of peddler, which folks circulated such literature
as part of their stock.
Spufford, Margaret (1984). The Great Reclothing of Rural England. London:
Hambledon Press. ISBN 978-0-907628-47-7.
Leitch, R. (1990). "'Here Chapman Billies Take Their Stand': A Pilot Study of
Scottish Chapmen, Packmen and Pedlars". Proceedings of the Scottish Society of
Antiquarians 120. pp. 173–88.
See Rainer Schöwerling, Chapbooks. Zur Literaturgeschichte des einfachen Lesers.
Englische Konsumliteratur 1680–1840 (Frankfurt, 1980), Margaret Spufford, Small
Books and Pleasant Histories. Pleasant Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-
Century England (London, 1981) and Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–
1640 (Cambridge, 1990).