Types+of+Novels

Mrs. Trudy A. Miller The Novel


 * Types of Novels and Novel Terminology**

1. **Adventure novel**: A novel in which exciting events are more important than character development and sometimes theme. Examples:
 * H. Rider Haggard, //King Solomon's Mines//
 * Baroness Orczy, //The Scarlet Pimpernel//
 * Alexandre Dumas, //The Three Musketeers//
 * Alexandre Dumas, //The Count of Monte Cristo//

2. **Autobiographical novel:** A novel based on the author's life experience. Many novelists include in their books people and events from their own lives because remembrance is easier than creation from scratch. Examples:
 * James Joyce, //Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man//
 * Thomas Wolfe, //Look Homeward, Angel//

3. **Bildungsroman:** Novel of all-around self-development. Used generally, it encompasses a few similar genres: the Entwicklungsroman, a story of general growth rather than self-culture; the Erziehungsroman, which focuses on training and formal education; and the Kunstlerroman, about the development of an artist. As follows is a definition of the Bildungsroman genre as a whole and how it applies to all three.
 * A Bildungsroman is, most generally, the story of a single individual's growth and development within the context of a defined social order. The growth process, at its roots a quest story, has been described as both "an apprenticeship to life" and a "search for meaningful existence within society."
 * To spur the hero or heroine on to their journey, some form of loss or discontent must jar them at an early stage away from the home or family setting.
 * The process of maturity is long, arduous, and gradual, consisting of repeated clashes between the protagonist's needs and desires and the views and judgments enforced by an unbending social order.
 * Eventually, the spirit and values of the social order become manifest in the protagonist, who is then accommodated into society. The novel ends with an assessment by the protagonist of himself and his new place in that society.

Examples: //Great Expectations, Aurora Leigh, Waterland//

4. **Canon:** In relation to literature, this term is half-seriously applied to those works generally accepted as the great ones. A battle is now being fought to change or throw out the canon for three reasons. First, the list of great books is thoroughly dominated by DWEM's (dead, white, European males), and the accusation is that women and minorities and non-Western cultural writers have been ignored. Second, there is pressure in the literary community to throw out all standards as the nihilism of the late 20th century makes itself felt in the literature departments of the universities. Scholars and professors want to choose the books they like or which reflect their own ideas, without worrying about canonicity. Third, the canon has always been determined at least in part by political considerations and personal philosophical biases. Books are much more likely to be called "great" if they reflect the philosophical ideas of the critic.

5. **Children's novel:** A novel written for children and discerned by one or more of these: (1) a child character or a character a child can identify with, (2) a theme or themes (often didactic) aimed at children, (3) vocabulary and sentence structure available to a young reader. Many "adult" novels, such as Gulliver's Travels, are read by children. The test is that the book be interesting to and--at some level--accessible by children. Examples:
 * Mark Twain, //Tom Sawyer//
 * L. M. Montgomery, //Anne of Green Gables//

6. **Christian novel:** A novel either explicitly or implicitly informed by Christian faith and often containing a plot revolving around the Christian life, evangelism, or conversion stories. Sometimes the plots are directly religious, and sometimes they are allegorical or symbolic. Traditionally, most Christian novels have been viewed as having less literary quality than the "great" novels of Western literature. Examples: 7. **Coming-of-age story:** A type of novel where the protagonist is initiated into adulthood through knowledge, experience, or both, often by a process of disillusionment. Understanding comes after the dropping of preconceptions, a destruction of a false sense of security, or in some way the loss of innocence. Some of the shifts that take place are these: Example:
 * Charles Sheldon, //In His Steps//
 * Lloyd C. Douglas, //The Robe//
 * Henryk Sienkiewicz, //Quo Vadis//
 * Par Lagerkvist, //Barabbas//
 * Catherine Marshall, //Christy//
 * C. S. Lewis, //Perelandra//
 * G. K. Chesterton, //The Man Who was Thursday//
 * Bodie Thoene, //In My Father's House//
 * ignorance to knowledge
 * innocence to experience
 * false view of world to correct view
 * idealism to realism
 * immature responses to mature responses
 * Jane Austen //Northanger Abbey//

8. **Detective novel:** A novel focusing on the solving of a crime, often by a brilliant detective, and usually employing the elements of mystery and suspense. Examples:
 * Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, //The Hound of the Baskervilles//
 * Agatha Christie, //Murder on the Orient Express//
 * Dorothy Sayers, //Strong Poison//

9. **Dystopian novel:** An anti-utopian novel where, instead of a paradise, everything has gone wrong in the attempt to create a perfect society. See utopian novel. Examples:
 * George Orwell, //Nineteen Eighty-Four//
 * Aldous Huxley, //Brave New World//

10. **Epistolary novel:** A novel consisting of letters written by a character or several characters. The form allows for the use of multiple points of view toward the story and the ability to dispense with an omniscient narrator. Examples:
 * Samuel Richardson, //Pamela//
 * Samuel Richardson, //Clarissa//
 * Fanny Burney, //Evelina//
 * C. S. Lewis, //The Screwtape Letters//
 * Hannah W. Foster, The Coquette

11. **Existentialist novel:** A novel written from an existentialist viewpoint, often pointing out the absurdity and meaninglessness of existence. Example:
 * Albert Camus, //The Stranger//

12. **Fantasy novel:** Any novel that is disengaged from reality. Often such novels are set in nonexistent worlds, such as under the earth, in a fairyland, on the moon, etc. The characters are often something other than human or include nonhuman characters. Example:
 * J. R. R. Tolkien, //The Hobbit//

13. **Flashback:** A device that allows the writer to present events that happened before the time of the current narration or the current events in the fiction. Flashback techniques include memories, dreams, stories of the past told by characters, or even authorial sovereignty. (That is, the author might simply say, "But back in Tom's youth. . . .") Flashback is useful for exposition, to fill in the reader about a character or place, or about the background to a conflict.

14. **Gothic novel:** A novel in which supernatural horrors and an atmosphere of unknown terror pervades the action. The setting is often a dark, mysterious castle, where ghosts and sinister humans roam menacingly. Horace Walpole invented the genre with his Castle of Otranto. Gothic elements include these:
 * Ancient prophecy, especially mysterious, obscure, or hard to understand.
 * Mystery and suspense
 * High emotion, sentimentalism, but also pronounced anger, surprise, and especially terror
 * Supernatural events (e.g. a giant, a sighing portrait, ghosts or their apparent presence, a skeleton)
 * Omens, portents, dream visions
 * Fainting, frightened, screaming women
 * Women threatened by powerful, impetuous male
 * Setting in a castle, especially with secret passages
 * The metonymy of gloom and horror (wind, rain, doors grating on rusty hinges, howls in the distance, distant sighs, footsteps approaching, lights in abandoned rooms, gusts of wind blowing out lights or blowing suddenly, characters trapped in rooms or imprisoned)
 * The vocabulary of the gothic (use of words indicating fear, mystery, etc.: apparition, devil, ghost, haunted, terror, fright)

Examples:
 * Horace Walpole, //The Castle of Otranto//
 * William Beckford, //Vathek//
 * Anne Radcliffe, //The Mysteries of Udolpho//
 * Mary Shelley, //Frankenstein//
 * Daphne du Maurier, //Rebecca//

15. **Gothic Romance:** Presents a stormy love relationship within a violent, brooding atmosphere.

16. **Historical novel:** A novel where fictional characters take part in actual historical events and interact with real people from the past. Examples:
 * Sir Walter Scott, //Ivanhoe//
 * Sir Walter Scott, //Waverly//
 * James Fenimore Cooper, //Last of the Mohicans//
 * Lloyd C. Douglas, //The Robe//

17. **Hypertext novel:** A novel that can be read in a nonsequential way. That is, whereas most novels flow from beginning to end in a continuous, linear fashion, a hypertext novel can branch--the reader can move from one place in the text to another nonsequential place whenever he wishes to trace an idea or follow a character. Also called hyperfiction. Most are published on CD-ROM. See also interactive novel. Examples:
 * Michael Joyce, //Afternoon//
 * Stuart Moulthrop, //Victory Garden//

18. **Interactive novel:** A novel with more than one possible series of events or outcomes. The reader is given the opportunity at various places to choose what will happen next. It is therefore possible for several readers to experience different novels by reading the same book or for one reader to experience different novels by reading the same one twice and making different choices.

19. **Multicultural novel:** A novel written by a member of or about a cultural minority group, giving insight into non-Western or non-dominant cultural experiences and values, either in the United States or abroad. Examples:
 * Chinua Achebe, //Things Fall Apart//
 * Amy Tan, //The Kitchen God's Wife//
 * Forrest Carter, //The Education of Little Tree//
 * Margaret Craven, //I Heard the Owl Call My Name//
 * James Baldwin, //Go Tell It on the Mountain//
 * Chaim Potok, //The Chosen//
 * Isaac Bashevis Singer, //The Penitent//
 * Alice Walker, //The Color Purple//

20. **Mystery novel:** A novel whose driving characteristic is the element of suspense or mystery. Strange, unexplained events, vague threats or terrors, unknown forces or antagonists, all may appear in a mystery novel. Gothic novels and detective novels are often also mystery novels.

21. **Naturalistic novel:** Pessimistically portrays sordidness, squalor, and violence through characters who have no control over their destinies.

22. **Novel:** Novels are so varied that any definition is likely to be inadequate to cover all of them. So here is a place to start: a novel is an extended prose fiction narrative of 50,000 words or more, broadly realistic--concerning the everyday events of ordinary people--and concerned with character. "People in significant action" is one way of describing it.

Another definition might be "an extended, fictional prose narrative about realistic characters and events." It is a representation of life, experience, and learning. Action, discovery, and description are important elements, but the most important tends to be one or more characters--how they grow, learn, find--or don't grow, learn, or find.

Compare the definition of a romance, below, and you will see why this definition seems somewhat restrictive.

23. **Novella:** A prose fiction longer than a short story but shorter than a novel. There is no standard definition of length, but since rules of thumb are sometimes handy, we might say that the short story ends at about 20,000 words, while the novel begins at about 50,000. Thus, the novella is a fictional work of about 20,000 to 50,000 words. Examples:
 * Henry James, //Daisy Miller//
 * Robert Louis Stevenson, //Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde//
 * Henry James, //Turn of the Screw//
 * Joseph Conrad, //Heart of Darkness//

24. **Novel of manners:** A novel focusing on and describing in detail the social customs and habits of a particular social group. Usually these conventions function as shaping or even stifling controls over the behavior of the characters. Examples:
 * Jane Austen, //Pride and Prejudice//
 * William Makepeace Thackeray, //Vanity Fair//

25. **Picaresque novel:** An episodic, often autobiographical novel about a rogue or picaro (a person of low social status) wandering around and living off his wits. The wandering hero provides the author with the opportunity to connect widely different pieces of plot, since the hero can wander into any situation. Picaresque novels tend to be satiric and filled with petty detail. Examples:
 * Daniel Defoe, //Moll Flanders//
 * Miguel de Cervantes, //Don Quixote//
 * Henry Fielding, //Jonathan Wild//

26. **Pseudonym**: A "false name" or alias used by a writer desiring not to use his or her real name. Sometimes called a nom de plume or "pen name," pseudonyms have been popular for several reasons.

First, political realities might make it dangerous for the real author to admit to a work. Beatings, imprisonment, and even execution are not unheard of for authors of unpopular works.

Second, an author might have a certain type of work associated with a certain name, so that different names are used for different kinds of work. One pen name might be used for westerns, while another name would be used for science fiction.

Lastly, an author might choose a literary name that sounds more impressive or that will garner more respect than the author's real name. Examples:
 * Samuel Clemens used the name Mark Twain
 * Mary Ann Evans used the name George Eliot
 * Jonathan Swift used the name Lemuel Gulliver (once)

27. **Psychological novel:** Emphasizes internal motives, conflicts, opinions of the main characters, which then develop the external action.

28. **Pulp fiction:** Novels written for the mass market, intended to be "a good read,"--often exciting, titillating, thrilling. Historically they have been very popular but critically sneered at as being of sub-literary quality. The earliest ones were the dime novels of the nineteenth century, printed on newsprint (hence "pulp" fiction) and sold for ten cents. Westerns, stories of adventure, even the Horatio Alger novels, all were forms of pulp fiction.

29. **Realistic novel:** Portrays life objectively, without idealizations; reveals unpleasantness.

30. **Regional novel:** A novel faithful to a particular geographic region and its people, including behavior, customs, speech, and history. Examples:
 * Harper Lee, //To Kill a Mockingbird//
 * Thomas Hardy, //Return of the Native//

31. **Roman a clef:** [French for "novel with a key," pronounced roh MAHN ah CLAY] A novel in which historical events and actual people are written about under the pretense of being fiction. Examples:
 * Aphra Behn, //Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister//
 * Ernest Hemingway, //The Sun Also Rises//

32. **Romance:** An extended fictional prose narrative about improbable events involving characters that are quite different from ordinary people. Knights on a quest for a magic sword and aided by characters like fairies and trolls would be examples of things found in romance fiction. Examples:
 * Miguel de Cervantes, //Don Quixote//
 * Sir Philip Sidney, //The Arcadia//

In popular use, the modern romance novel is a formulaic love story (boy meets girl, obstacles interfere, they overcome obstacles, they live happily ever after). Computer software is available for constructing these stock plots and providing stereotyped characters. Consequently, the books usually lack literary merit. Examples:
 * Harlequin Romance series

33. **Satirical novel:** Reveals human folly and vices through wit, scorn, ridicule, and exaggeration with hope for reform.

34. **Science fiction novel:** A novel in which futuristic technology or otherwise altered scientific principles contribute in a significant way to the adventures. Often the novel assumes a set of rules or principles or facts and then traces their logical consequences in some form. For example, given that a man discovers how to make himself invisible, what might happen? Examples:
 * H. G. Wells, //The Invisible Man//
 * Aldous Huxley, //Brave New World//
 * Arthur C. Clarke, //2001: A Space Odyssey//
 * Ray Bradbury, //The Martian Chronicles//

35. **Sentimental novel:** A type of novel, popular in the eighteenth century, that overemphasizes emotion and seeks to create emotional responses in the reader. The type also usually features an overly optimistic view of the goodness of human nature. Examples:
 * Oliver Goldsmith, //The Vicar of Wakefield//
 * Henry Mackenzie, //The Man of Feeling//
 * Laurence Sterne, //A Sentimental Journey//
 * Thomas Day, //The History of Sandford and Merton//

36. **Sequel:** A novel incorporating the same characters and often the same setting as a previous novel. Sometimes the events and situations involve a continuation of the previous novel and sometimes only the characters are the same and the events are entirely unrelated to the previous novel. When sequels result from the popularity of an original, they are often hastily written and not of the same quality as the original. Occasionally a sequel is written by an author different from that of the original novel. See series. Examples:
 * Mark Twain, //Adventures of Tom Sawyer//
 * Mark Twain, //Tom Sawyer Abroad//
 * Mark Twain, //Tom Sawyer Detective//
 * Margaret Mitchell, //Gone With the Wind//
 * Alexandra Ripley, //Scarlett//

37. **Series:** Several novels related to each other, by plot, setting, character, or all three. Book marketers like to refer to multi-volume novels as sagas. Examples:
 * Anthony Trollope, //Barsetshire// novels
 * C. S. Lewis, //Chronicles of Narnia// novels
 * L. M. Montgomery//, Anne of Avonlea// novels
 * James Fenimore Cooper//, The Leatherstocking// Tales

38. **Sociological novel:** Depicts the problems and injustices of society; makes moral judgments and offers resolution.

39. **Stream- of- Consciousness novel:** Presents the total range of thoughts, memories, associations of a character in uninterrupted, endless flow. Example:
 * Virginia Wolfe, //To the Lighthouse//
 * Dalton Trumbo, //Johnny Got His Gun//

40. **Utopian novel:** A novel that presents an ideal society where the problems of poverty, greed, crime, and so forth have been eliminated. Examples:
 * Thomas More, //Utopia//
 * Samuel Butler, //Erewhon//
 * Edward Bellamy, //Looking Backward//

41. **Verisimilitude:** How fully the characters and actions in a work of fiction conform to our sense of reality. To say that a work has a high degree of verisimilitude means that the work is very realistic and believable--it is "true to life.".

42. **Western:** A novel set in the western United States featuring the experiences of cowboys and frontiersmen. Many are little more than adventure novels or even pulp fiction, but some have literary value. Examples:
 * Walter Van Tilburg Clark, //The Ox-Bow Incident//
 * Owen Wister, //The Virginian//

Sources: A Glossary of Literary Terms - http://www.virtualsalt.com/litterms.htm

Advanced Placement English: Practical Approaches to Literary Analysis – The Center for Learning

The Bildungsroman Genre: Great Expectations, Aurora Leigh, and Waterland Suzanne Hader (English 168, 1996) http://65.107.211.206/victorian/genre/hader1.html

Last updated: 3/21/08