Novella

For the French commune, see Novella, Haute-Corse.

A novella is a narrative work of prose fiction somewhat longer than a short story but shorter than a novel. A common length is about 50 to 100 pages, or around 20,000 to 40,000 words. The extra length is generally used for more character development than is possible in a short story, but without the much greater character and plot development of a novel. Novellas often are characterized by satire or moral teaching.

Although the novella is a common literary genre in several European languages, it is less common in English. English-speaking readers would be most familiar with the novellas of Franz Kafka, particularly The Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony, or George Orwell's Animal Farm and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Stephen King is one of the few American authors who often writes novellas, such as those adapted as Secret Window, The Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me, although they are usually published in collections.

Like the English word "novel", the English word "novella" derives from the Italian word "novella" (plural: "novelle"), for a tale, a piece of news. As the etymology suggests, novellas originally were news of town and country life worth repeating for amusement and edification.

History

As a literary genre, the novella's origin lay in the early Renaissance literary work of the Italians and the French. Principally, by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), author of The Decameron (1353)—one hundred novelle told by ten people, seven women and three men, fleeing the Black Death by escaping from Florence to the Fiesole hills, in 1348; and by the French Queen, Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549), Marguerite de Valois, et. alii., author of Heptaméron (1559)—seventy-two original French tales (structured like The Decameron). Her psychological acuity and didactic purpose outweigh the unfinished collection's weak literary style.

Not until the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries did writers fashion the novella into a literary genre structured by precepts and rules. Contemporaneously, the Germans were the most active writers of the Novelle (German: "Novelle"; plural: "Novellen"). For the German writer, a novella is a fictional narrative of indeterminate length—a few pages to hundreds—restricted to a single, suspenseful event, situation, or conflict leading to an unexpected turning point (Wendepunkt), provoking a logical, but surprising end; Novellen tend to contain a concrete symbol, which is the narration's steady point.

Novella versus novel

In German, Dutch and Scandinavian, the word for "novella" is Novelle, and the word for "novel" is Roman (though Dutch and Scandinavian does not use initial capitals). In French "novella" is nouvelle and "novel" is roman. This etymological distinction avoids confusion of the literatures and the forms, with the novel being the more important, established fictional form. The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig's (1881-1942) Die Schachnovelle (1942) (literally, "The Chess Novella", but translated in 1944 as The Royal Game) is an example of a title naming its genre.

Commonly, longer novellas are addressed as novels; though incorrectly, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Heart of Darkness are called novels, as are many science fiction works such as The War of the Worlds and Armageddon 2419 A.D.. Occasionally, longer works are addressed as novellas, with some academics positing 100,000 words as the novella‒novel threshold. In the science fiction genre, the Hugo and Nebula literary awards define the novella as: "A… story of between seventeen thousand, five hundred (17,500) and forty thousand (40,000) words."

Stephen King, in his introduction to Different Seasons, an anthology of four of his novellas, has called the novella "an ill-defined and disreputable literary banana republic"; King notes the difficulties of selling a novella in the commercial publishing world, since it does not fit the typical length requirements of either magazine or book publishers. Other authors disagree; in the introduction to a novella anthology titled Sailing to Byzantium, Robert Silverberg writes:

"novella is one of the richest and most rewarding of literary forms...it allows for more extended development of theme and character than does the short story, without making the elaborate structural demands of the full-length book. Thus it provides an intense, detailed exploration of its subject, providing to some degree both the concentrated focus of the short story and the broad scope of the novel."(Silverberg, vii)

Reference:

Silverberg, Robert. Sailing to Byzantium. New York: ibooks, inc., 2000.

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History

Novella versus novel

Reference:

See also