novella

Italian novella means 'a new thing, a piece of news, a short story.' It comes from Latin novellus, diminutive of novus (new). Boccaccio's Decameron (1353) was a collection of novelle — short tales, each one a 'new' story. The Spanish picaresque novels of the sixteenth century and Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605) expanded the form. By the eighteenth century, English 'novel' named a full-length prose fiction narrative — a meaning the Italian word never had.

The English novel emerged in the early eighteenth century. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740), and Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) are usually cited as the first English novels, though the argument about which came first is unresolvable. What was new was the combination: extended prose, fictional characters who felt real, a plot that developed over hundreds of pages. Poetry and drama had existed for millennia. The novel was new.

The word competed with 'romance' for decades. A 'romance' was the older term for extended prose fiction — tales of knights, love, adventure. The 'novel' was supposedly more realistic. The distinction was partly snobbery: 'novel' sounded French and modern; 'romance' sounded medieval and fanciful. By the nineteenth century, 'novel' won the status competition, and 'romance' narrowed to a genre (love stories). The new word defeated the old one.

The novel is now the dominant literary form worldwide. About 500,000 new novels are published in English annually. The form has absorbed every narrative mode — epistolary, stream-of-consciousness, graphic, autofictional, speculative, historical. A novel can be 50,000 words or 600,000. It can be literary fiction or genre fiction. The word that meant 'new story' now names the most capacious and varied literary container in existence.