The novel: what it is

---

It may seem surprising that the familiar noun novel is related as well. In the 14th century, Italian writers began writing collections of short tales, each of which they called a novella because it represented a new literary form; from this word, three centuries later, the English coined the noun novel.

How do you analyze a novel?

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'novel. See more words from the same century. See the full definition for novel in the English Language Learners Dictionary. Translation of novel for Spanish Speakers. Translation of novel for Arabic Speakers. Encyclopedia article about novel. What made you want to look up novel?

Please tell us where you read or heard it including the quote, if possible. Test Your Knowledge - and learn some interesting things along the way. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! Our Word of the Year justice , plus 10 more. Yeggs, jackrollers, footpads, and more.

How we chose 'justice'.

novel | Definition, Elements, Types, & Facts | www.farmersmarketmusic.com

And is one way more correct than the others? How to use a word that literally drives some people nuts. Understanding Media tells us little about what media necessarily will arise, only what impact on the collective psyche they must have.

In the late 20th century, a culture typified by a consumerist ethic was convinced that it — that we — could have it all. This "having it all" was even ascribed its own cultural era: The main objection to this is, I think, at once profoundly commonsensical and curiously subtle. By the same token, if — as many seem keen to assert — postmodernism has already run its course, then what should we say has replaced it, post-postmodernism, perhaps? The use of montage for transition; the telescoping of fictional characters into their streams of consciousness; the abandonment of the omniscient narrator; the inability to suspend disbelief in the artificialities of plot — these were always latent in the problematic of the novel form, but in the early 20th century, under pressure from other, juvenescent, narrative forms, the novel began to founder.

You may find it difficult to concentrate, given the vagaries of your own ageing Gutenberg mind, while your reading material itself may also have a senescent feel, what with its greying stock and bleeding type — the equivalent, in codex form, of old copies of the Reader's Digest left lying around in dentists' waiting rooms.

Did You Know?

I've often thought that western European socialism survived as a credible ideological alternative up until purely because of the Soviet counterexample: So it was with the novel: Now film, too, is losing its narrative hegemony, and so the novel — the cultural Greece to its world-girdling Rome — is also in ineluctable decline. I was affronted, not so much by the money although pro rata it meant I was being paid considerably less than I would have working in McDonald's , but by not receiving the sanctification of hard covers.

Navigation menu

The agent I consulted told me to accept without demur: At that time the reconfiguration of the medium was being felt through the ending of the Net Book Agreement, the one-time price cartel that shored up publishers' profits by outlawing retailer discounting. I switched to writing the first drafts of my fictions on a manual typewriter about a decade ago because of the inception of broadband internet.

The novel is dead (this time it's for real)

With broadband it became seamless: Worse, if, as a writer, you reached an impasse where you couldn't imagine what something looked or sounded like, the web was there to provide instant literalism: All the opinions and conceptions of the new media amount to nothing set beside the way they're actually used. Packer observes that this development parallels others in the neoliberal economy, which sees market choice as the only human desideratum. The US court's ruling against the big five publishers in the English-speaking world and in favour of Amazon was predicated on this: But, really, this was only the latest skirmish in a long war; the battles of the s, when both here and in the US chain bookstores began to gobble up the independents, were part of the same conflict: I've no doubt that a revenue stream for digitised factual text will be established: And yet I had an amazing time.

Do you prefer to read on paper or a screen? I barely read on hard copy any more. But those of us who are digital immigrants, we carry with us the Gutenberg categories and ways of thinking about it.

How do you analyze a novel?

When it comes to writing, I take entirely the opposite view. What are you reading at the moment?

Ditto with literature in English from more diverse cultural backgrounds and heritages. Topics Will Self Books interview.

Order by newest oldest recommendations.

• Brachmans Underworld
• Flash Cards for E-Pubs: Subtraction (Learning Math E-Pubs for Children Book 1)
• The Lifted Veil
• La Médecine par les plantes (Hors Collection) (French Edition)
• The IRA on Film and Television: A History
• Crossing Zero: The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire (City Lights Open Media)