The Novella's Own Defense

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Judith Leibowitz spent her 1970 dissertation, later published as Narrative Purpose in the Novella, arguing with a shelf of critics who had already decided the question did not need arguing. A novella, on the ordinary account, is just a short novel, a matter of word count, seventeen thousand words at one end and forty thousand at the other, with nothing more at stake than where an editor draws the line. Leibowitz thought the ordinary account missed the point. She read her way through a century of novellas and found the same device recurring book after book: a single image or pattern, repeated until it does two things at once, compresses the story down to its essential shape and expands what that shape means. A short story does not have room for the repetition to build. A novel has so much room the device dissolves into everything else happening around it. Only the novella's particular length lets the device do both jobs, which is why Leibowitz called it the form's own structural principle rather than an accident of size. The Cambridge History of the English Short Story keeps the argument alive just by choosing its chapter title, The Novella, Between the Novel and the Story, as if the form's whole identity were a location on someone else's map rather than a country of its own. Albert Camus's The Stranger, thirty-six thousand words built almost entirely around one act on one beach, is exactly the kind of book the argument was written for.