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.
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), [aka 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.
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 novellaâ€'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:
"[The 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)
*Silverberg, Robert.
Sailing to Byzantium. New York: ibooks, inc., 2000.
*
List of Novellas*
Literature*
Novel*
Novelette
