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- Novels are prose, written in paragraphs, and provide detailed storytelling through narration and dialogue. Poetry uses lines and stanzas instead of sentences and paragraphs, allowing poets to manipulate punctuation and grammar to convey their messages more emotively.
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Novels and poetry are both forms of literature that tell stories and evoke emotions, but they differ in their structure and style. Novels are typically longer works of fiction that follow a linear narrative, with characters, plot, and setting developed over the course of the story.
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A novel is an invented prose narrative of significant length and complexity that deals imaginatively with human experience. Its roots can be traced back thousands of years, though its origins in English are traditionally placed in the 18th century.
What are the elements of a novel?
A novel can accommodate an almost infinite number of elements. Some of the novel's typical elements, though, are the story or plot, the characters, the setting, the narrative method and point of view, and the scope or dimension.
What are the different types of novels?
The novel has an extensive range of types, among them being: historical, picaresque, sentimental, Gothic, psychological, novel of manners, epistolary, pastoral, roman à clef, antinovel, cult, detective, mystery, thriller, western, fantasy, and proletarian. There is no limit to the number of genres available to the novel.
novel, an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals imaginatively with human experience, usually through a connected sequence of events involving a group of persons in a specific setting. Within its broad framework, the genre of the novel has encompassed an extensive range of types and styles: picaresque, epistolary, Gothic, romantic, realist, historical—to name only some of the more important ones.
The novel is propelled through its hundred or thousand pages by a device known as the story or plot. This is frequently conceived by the novelist in very simple terms, a mere nucleus, a jotting on an old envelope: for example, Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol (1843) might have been conceived as “a misanthrope is reformed through certain magical visitations on Christmas Eve,” or Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) as “a young couple destined to be married have first to overcome the barriers of pride and prejudice,” or Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) as “a young man commits a crime and is slowly pursued in the direction of his punishment.” The detailed working out of the nuclear idea requires much ingenuity, since the plot of one novel is expected to be somewhat different from that of another, and there are very few basic human situations for the novelist to draw upon. The dramatist may take his plot ready-made from fiction or biography—a form of theft sanctioned by Shakespeare—but the novelist has to produce what look like novelties.
The example of Shakespeare is a reminder that the ability to create an interesting plot, or even any plot at all, is not a prerequisite of the imaginative writer’s craft. At the lowest level of fiction, plot need be no more than a string of stock devices for arousing stock responses of concern and excitement in the reader. The reader’s interest may be captured at the outset by the promise of conflicts or mysteries or frustrations that will eventually be resolved, and he will gladly—so strong is his desire to be moved or entertained—suspend criticism of even the most trite modes of resolution. In the least sophisticated fiction, the knots to be untied are stringently physical, and the denouement often comes in a sort of triumphant violence. Serious fiction prefers its plots to be based on psychological situations, and its climaxes come in new states of awareness—chiefly self-knowledge—on the parts of the major characters.
Melodramatic plots, plots dependent on coincidence or improbability, are sometimes found in even the most elevated fiction; E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) is an example of a classic British novel with such a plot. But the novelist is always faced with the problem of whether it is more important to represent the formlessness of real life (in which there are no beginnings and no ends and very few simple motives for action) or to construct an artifact as well balanced and economical as a table or chair; since he is an artist, the claims of art, or artifice, frequently prevail.
There are, however, ways of constructing novels in which plot may play a desultory part or no part at all. The traditional picaresque novel—a novel with a rogue as its central character—like Alain Lesage’s Gil Blas (1715) or Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), depends for movement on a succession of chance incidents. In the works of Virginia Woolf, the consciousness of the characters, bounded by some poetic or symbolic device, sometimes provides all the fictional material. Marcel Proust’s great roman-fleuve, À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past), has a metaphysical framework derived from the time theories of the philosopher Henri Bergson, and it moves toward a moment of truth that is intended to be literally a revelation of the nature of reality. Strictly, any scheme will do to hold a novel together—raw action, the hidden syllogism of the mystery story, prolonged solipsist contemplation—so long as the actualities or potentialities of human life are credibly expressed, with a consequent sense of illumination, or some lesser mode of artistic satisfaction, on the part of the reader.
- Anthony Burgess
Oct 8, 2024 · Quick answer: The primary distinction between the genres of novel, poetry, and drama lies in their structure and purpose. Novels are prose, written in paragraphs, and provide detailed...
Oct 24, 2024 · poetry, literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm.
Jun 7, 2024 · A novel is a narrative work of prose fiction that tells a story about specific human or character experiences over a considerable length. Prose style and length, as well as fictional or semi-fictional subject matter, are the most clearly defining characteristics of a novel.
- Amanda Prahl
A novel (NAH-vull) is a narrative work of fiction published in book form. Novels are longer than short stories and novellas, with the greater length allowing authors to expand upon the same basic components of all fictional literature—character, conflict, plot, and setting, to name a few.
Oct 14, 2024 · Poetry that fails as literature is not called poetry at all but verse. Many novels—certainly all the world’s great novels—are literature, but there are thousands that are not so considered.