The Novella

[Lioness_Heart]

What do people think of the novella as a form of literature? Lately, I've found that people seem to sneer at novellas, and seem to think that because they are short, they are inferior literature. As a reader, people look down on you for reading them as though you 'can't handle' anything longer.

There seems to be an increasing trend for long books - as though a great length instantly imbues a book with literary quality.

However, I disagree with this (and want to know how many other people feel the same). I love books of all lengths. But I also believe that the novella has qualities that longer books can lack. Firstly, a novella has to be concise: like in a short story, the characterisation must be rapid and effective, yet there must be a greater depth to the plot than a short story can allow. This must take a great amount of skill as an author!

This also means that novellas can have a more immediate emotional impact on the reader, as the ideas must be communicated concisely and without the preamble that can sometimes detract from them.

Also, a novella can make a good introduction to an author's work: not being too long, it can be more accessible to new or younger readers, especially if the book is particularly haunting and emotional. For example, I love Steinbeck's writing, and started by reading Of Mice and Men. If I had read The Grapes of Wrath, for example, beforehand, I don't think I would have gotten into it so well: reading a novella can get you used to the author's style, the themes they are concerned with, and can be a good way of getting into their work, just as an effective opening chapter is important in absorbing you into a book.

I've waffled long enough. So, what do we think? Is the novella for an author who has nothing to say, or one who knows how to say it? What are your favourite novellas? And does the novella deserve a comeback as a form of literature?

[PeterL]

I think that novellas can be great. There are novels that are only 20,000 words. The Thin Man comes to mind and The Maltese Falcon. Both are novels in structure and development, but they aren't very long. These days publishers seem to want long books (it has to do with cost versus sales price), and I have read that some readers judge books by their length.

[NickAdams]

"The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes!
-- Jorge Luis Borges

[JBI]

Novellas are great, but usually they just get called short stories, or novels. Gatsby seems novellaesque in length, but we call it a novel. Henry James and Joseph Conrad were working heavilly with novellas, but just called them novels or short stories. Novella really, as a genre, isn't a genre.

I see no point distinguishing between works that are 50,000 and 100,000 words in length, meanwhile we don't distinguish between works 100,000 and 1,000,000 words in length. This categorization is more important to the publishers than the readers anyway, as very few novellas, or short stories, are sold as such, and therefore they are usually bundled with more than one work. For the reader, he himself must either read it as a short story or a novel, he cannot really read it as a novella, since a novella isn't an actual genre, but a long short story, or short novel.

[Erichtho]

If you like novellas, you should look into German literature, as it is a very typical genre there. The novella is my favourite genre in prose (@JBI many books in Germany are sold as novellas, it's definitely its own genre).

Concerning the distinction between novels and novellas: a novella is shorter, has normally no subplots and just very few characters. The plot in general concentrates on one big event that is some kind of turning point for the character's life. What distincts the novella from the short story is the length, the structure, which is basically like that of a drama (Storm called the novella the sister of the drama) and the closed form.

Some great novellas:

Michael Kolhaas by H. v. Kleist
Lenz by G. Büchner
Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts by E.T.A. Hoffmann
Mozart on his Way to Prague by E. Mörike
Aquis submersus by Th. Storm
Das Amulett by C.F. Meyer
The Chess Novella by St. Zweig
Lieutenant Gustl by A. Schnitzler
...

[JBI]

Yes, that is true, the novella is a form in German, and Russian literature, but really not in English literature. There really aren't even that many magazines who still will print something of that length, or many publishers looking specifically for them.

[aeroport]

What do people think of the novella as a form of literature? Lately, I've found that people seem to sneer at novellas, and seem to think that because they are short, they are inferior literature. As a reader, people look down on you for reading them as though you 'can't handle' anything longer.

People, in general, are morons.
In all seriousness, though, I've always really enjoyed the shorter forms as well. What's not to like about a book of which the quality is determined largely by the degree to which it 'doesn't mess around'? My favorites at the moment are James's The Beast in the Jungle and Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus.
I do hope you haven't had such an experience yourself; in any event, the opinion of anyone who makes so bold as to sneer at you for reading whatever the bloody hell you want can pretty well be dismissed.
I liked your 'defence' of the novella. Very 'right on'. :thumbs_up


There seems to be an increasing trend for long books - as though a great length instantly imbues a book with literary quality.
It's a trend which I've read a great many serious writers lamenting in interviews and such. I don't understand it, and it certainly doesn't inspire me with any greater inclination to read these books.

[Virgil]

People, in general, are morons.

:lol: :lol:



In all seriousness, though, I've always really enjoyed the shorter forms as well. What's not to like about a book of which the quality is determined largely by the degree to which it 'doesn't mess around'? My favorites at the moment are James's The Beast in the Jungle and Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus.
I do hope you haven't had such an experience yourself; in any event, the opinion of anyone who makes so bold as to sneer at you for reading whatever the bloody hell you want can pretty well be dismissed.
I liked your 'defence' of the novella. Very 'right on'. :thumbs_up


It's a trend which I've read a great many serious writers lamenting in interviews and such. I don't understand it, and it certainly doesn't inspire me with any greater inclination to read these books.
I agree with your assessment by the way. Other great novellas that come to mind are The Red Badge of Courage (Stephan Crane) and Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad).

[muhsin]

Heart of Darkness[/I] (Joseph Conrad).

Had never realized that that text was a novella. I always did conider it as a novel.

[sofia82]

This is the definition of novella and an introduction to it from THE PENGUIN DICTIONARY OF LITERARY TERMS AND LITERARY THEORY by Cuddon (600-601):

Originally a novella was a kind of short story, a narrative in prose of the genre developed by Boccaccio. His Decameron ... was a collection of such stories. Later there appeared Tomassa Guardati's Novellino . In the 16th c. Bandello published a collection of 214 novelle. Tudor dramatists often used novelle as source-books for plots. Thereafter, there was little sign of the novella developing for some time; unless one were to include in this category some of the narratives of Deloney and Greene, Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller , Emanuel Ford's lrnatus and Artesia, Mrs Behn's Oroonoko and Congreve's Incognita. But such works may also be regarded as romances, or embryonic novels. It was not until late in the 18th and early in the 19th c. that the novella was fashioned into a particular form according to certain precepts and rules. Then the Germans became the most active practitioners, and the Novelle has since flourished in Germany more than anywhere else.

Basically, the Novelle is a fictional narrative of indeterminate length (a few pages to two or three hundred), restricted to a single event, situation or conflict, which produces an element of suspense and leads to an unexpected turning point (Wendepunkt) so that the conclusion surprises even while it is a logical outcome. Many Novellen contain a concrete symbol which is the steady point, as it were, at the heart of the narrative.

Goethe attempted to summarize the quiddity of the Novelle when he said: .'What else is a Novelle about but an event which is unheard of but has taken place?' Or, more concisely, 'an event without precedent' ('eine sich ereignete unerhörte Begebenheit').

The first of its kind, in all probability, was Goethe's Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten, derived from the novella form used by Boccaccio. It is a Novelle with a cyclic frame or Rahmen. There has been a good deal of debate and theory ever since as to what precisely a Novelle is or should be. August Schlegel theorized about it and stressed the importance of the wendepunkt in the narrative. Tieck also stressed the importance of this. Later Paul Heyse worked out his Falkentheorie in Deutscher Novellenschatz. In 1828 Goethe had observed that the genre harboured 'many a wonderful thing'.

Among the principal practitioners were Goethe himself, Kleist (a vital influence in the creation of the short story, who published his stories as Erzählangen, Hoffmann, Tieck, Theodor Storm, Fontane, Paul Heyse, Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann. The Swiss writers Gottfried Keller and Conrad Meyer were also prolific; as were the Austrians Ferdinand Saar and Arthur Schnitzler.

Nowadays the term is often used to distinguish a long short-story from a short story and a short novel from a full-dress novel. Stories which might be placed in this middle-distance category are Tolstoy's The Cossacks and The Death of Ivan llyich; Thomas Mann's Tonio Kröger and Tod in Venedig; Aldous Huxley's Two or Three Graces; Alberto Moravia's Conjugal Love; Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea; and H. E. Bates's trilogy The Nature of Love. Some would also include Conrad's three long short-stories Youth, Heart of Darkness, and Typhoon.

[Virgil]

Had never realized that that text was a novella. I always did conider it as a novel.

Actually Muhsin I've seen both. It's about a hundred pages, so it's borderline.

[kasie]

I've just finished R L Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - does that count as a novella? It seems a bit more than a short story to me, being divided into sections and taking place over a period of time, with more than one source to the story - letters from different characters, telling their bit of the story - and it is some seventy pages long, too long for a short story but too short for a novel.

[Dori]

What do people think of the novella as a form of literature? Lately, I've found that people seem to sneer at novellas, and seem to think that because they are short, they are inferior literature. As a reader, people look down on you for reading them as though you 'can't handle' anything longer.

Well then let them sneer. They're the ones missing out! :D


I enjoyed a few of Tolstoy's novellas, such as Hadji Murad and The Kreutzer Sonata. I've yet to read his others.

[Pecksie]

Someone mentioned the Russian novellas. I think they're the best argument against those who "sneer on novellas". I'm thinking here of Turgenev's "First Love" and "Spring Streams", for instance, or Pushkin's "Captain's Daughter".

Other authors who have produced short novels I've enjoyed are Cesare Pavese and A. S. Byatt. I guess Steinbeck's beautiful "The Moon is Down" also qualifies as a novella.

In our increasingly harried times, novellas offer us fast reads (some of them can be read in the course of a day's commute) that are as good as any of the mammoth nineteenth-century novels we also adore... but seldom have time to plunge into.