The Novel

An extended work of prose fiction developing character and plot at a length and level of interior detail the shorter narrative forms do not attempt. Candidates for the earliest novel are debated across traditions rather than settled on one text: Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji, composed in early eleventh-century Japan, is widely cited as an early and fully realized example of the form, well before the eighteenth-century European novel of Defoe and Richardson that older, Eurocentric literary histories once treated as the form's point of origin. The novel's subsequent range, from Austen's novel of manners to Dostoevsky's philosophical and psychological fiction to Garcia Marquez's magical realism, is part of why the form resists a single definition beyond its length and its prose.