Novella
A novella is a narrative prose fiction whose length is shorter than most novels, but longer than most novelettes and short stories. The English word novella derives from the Italian novella meaning a short story related to true (or apparently so) facts.
This article is about the literary form. For other uses, see Novella (disambiguation).Definition[edit]
The Italian term is a feminine of novello, which means new, similarly to the English word news.[1] Merriam-Webster defines a novella as "a work of fiction intermediate in length and complexity between a short story and a novel".[1] There is disagreement regarding the number of pages or words necessary for a story to be considered a novella, a short story or a novel.[2] The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association defines a novella's word count to be between 17,500 and 40,000 words;[3][4] at 250 words per page, this equates to 70 to 160 pages. See below for definitions used by other organisations.
History[edit]
The novella as a literary genre began developing in the Italian literature of the early Renaissance, principally by Giovanni Boccaccio, author of The Decameron (1353).[5] The Decameron featured 100 tales (named novellas) told by ten people (seven women and three men) fleeing the Black Death, by escaping from Florence to the Fiesole hills in 1348. This structure was then imitated by subsequent authors, notably the French queen Marguerite de Navarre, whose Heptaméron (1559) included 72 original French tales and was modeled after the structure of The Decameron.
The Italian genre novella grew out of a rich tradition of medieval short narrative forms. It took its first major form in the anonymous late 13th century Libro di novelle et di bel parlar gentile, known as Il Novellino, and reached its culmination with The Decameron. Followers of Boccaccio such as Giovanni Fiorentino, Franco Sacchetti, Giovanni Sercambi and Simone de' Prodenzani continued the tradition into the early 15th century. The Italian novella influenced many later writers, including Shakespeare.[6]
Novellas were also written in Spain. Miguel de Cervantes' book Novelas ejemplares (1613) added innovation to the genre with more attention to the depiction of human character and social background.[7]
Not until the late 18th and early 19th centuries did writers fashion the novella into a literary genre structured by precepts and rules, generally in a realistic mode. At that time, the Germans were the most active writers of the novelle (German: "Novelle"; plural: "Novellen").[7] 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 narrative's focal point.
The novella influenced the development of the short story and the novel throughout Europe.[8] In the late 19th century Henry James was one of the first English language critics to use the term novella for a story that was longer and more complex than a short story, but shorter than a novel.[7]
In English speaking countries the modern novella is rarely defined as a distinct literary genre, but is often used as a term for a short novel.[9]