From Conservapedia - Reading time: 2 min
A novel is a long, fictional book, almost always divided into smaller units, or chapters. The word has the same origin as the word "novel" meaning new. Therefore, it can be said that a "new novel" is a tautology.
The eleventh century The Tale of Genji, by Japanese author Murasaki Shikibu, has been described as the world's first novel.[1] The first modern European novel was Don Quixote de La Mancha (1605), written in Spanish by Miguel de Cervantes.
A very short novel (say between 20,000 and 50,000 words) is sometimes called a "novella." Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, consisting of about 38,000 words, is an example.
Word length of long novels[edit]
Here are the word lengths of notable long novels:[2]
- Bleak House, by Charles Dickens – 360,947 words
- Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens – 183,349 words
- War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy – 561,304 words
- Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy – 349,736 words
- Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell – 418,053 words
- Moby Dick, by Herman Melville – 206,052 words
- For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway – 174,106 words
- Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë – 183,858 words
- Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen – 126,194 words
- Catch-22, by Joseph Heller – 174,269 words
- Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand – 561,996 words
- Ulysses, by James Joyce – 265,222 words
American[edit]
- ‘’Red and Black’’, (‘’Le Rouge et le Noir’’), Stendhal (1830)
- ‘’Pierre Goriot‘’, (‘’Le Père Goriot’’), Honoré de Balzac (1835)
- The Count of Monte-Cristo’’, (‘’Le Comte de Monte-Cristo’’), Alexandre Dumas (1844)
- ‘’Madame Bovary’’ Gustave Flaubert (1857)
- Les Misérables, Victor Hugo (1862)
- ‘’Voyage to the Centre of the Earth’’ (‘’Voyage Au Centre de la Terre’’), Jules Verne (1864)
- ‘’Germinal’’, Emile Zola (1877).
- ‘'Green Wheat’’ (‘’Le Blé en Herbe,’’) Colette (1923).
- ‘’In Search of Lost Time‘’ (‘’A la Recherche du Temps Perdu’’), Marcel Proust (1927)
- ‘’Journey to the Edge of the Night (‘’Voyage au bout de la nuit’’), Céline (1932)
- Nausea’’ (‘’La Nausée’'), Jean-Paul Sartre (1938)
- The Plague (La Peste) Albert Camus (1947)
Russian[edit]
British[edit]
See also[edit]
References[edit]