Novels

In the wider sense, all extended prose fictions; in the narrower, those which copy real life, as opposed to the imaginative prose romance, such as those of chivalry, which survived till ab. 1700. Existing as a minor literary form among the Greeks and yet more ancient races, and revived in Italy in the shape of short tales (novelli) by Boccaccio, the novel of both kinds was highly cultivated in Spain, and to a le extent in France. In England, its importance was slight till popularized by Richardson and Fielding 1740-60. It reached its greatest vogue under Scott, whose influence was felt throughout Europe, and for some time dominant. Since his time, Dumas and Hugo in France, Cooper and Hawthorne in America, Turgenev and Tolstoi in Ru ia, have been followed or accompanied by a host of eminent writers. Fiction is now the largest and most prominent of literary fields, and is used not merely to entertain, but to convey le ons moral, theological, philosophic, social and political. The controversy between realism and romance is not ended, and involves that between the novel of tendency and the merely amusing story.