A Very Short History Of The Novel Poem by Paul Hartal

The novel is an extended piece of prose fiction.
The word derives fron Italian and means tale, or news.
The origins of the genre can be traced back
to stories of ancient Egypt. 'The Tale of Two Brothers'
for example, was written during the reign of Seti II
who ruled from 1200 tp 1194 BC.
In the Middle Ages, a Japanese woman.
writing under the pseudonym Murasaki Shikibu
(circa 1000) , wrote a long story, the tale of Genji,
about the adventures of a Japanese Don Juan
at the imperial court.
Also round about this time, in the Arab World,
The Thousand And One Nights were born.

In the 14th century of Italy many erotic short stories
circulated, of which Boccaccio's Decameron (1348-58)
were very well known.The Decameron exerted great influence on Chaucer and many others.

In Spain Cervantes published in 1605 Don Quixote
de la Mancha, a collection of stories satirizing chivalry. Many consider it as one of the greatest novels ever written.

In England Daniel Defoe's popular adventure story
of Robinson Crusoe appeared in 1719.
In the 19th century
the author of historical novels, Sir Walter Scott
(Ivenhoe,1819) was mor famous than Jane Austen
(admired for herPride and Prejudice,1813) . Arguably,
however, the greatest British nobelist novelist
of the 19th century was
Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities,
Hard Times, etc.) .

In Russia several great writers wrote novels in the 19th century,
among them Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Tolstoy
and Dostoyevsky. The novel also flourished in the 19th century
of France. Emile Zola, Honore de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas,
Jules Verne were among the best known authors at that time.
The novel was popular in America as well. James Fenimore Cooper's stirring stories of frontier life found their expression in
The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and other volumes.
Mark Twain
in 1876 produced The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In the 20th
century Ernest Hemingway made a great impact with such
works as For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
and The Old Man and the Sea (1950) .

In the 20th century, the novel saw an era of great literary experimentation. Virginia Wolf and
The Irish writer James Joyce experimented with language.
Joyce in Ulysses and other novels used the stream of consciousness as a literary technique.

The Czech writers Franz Kafka and J. Hasek achieved, respectively, world fame with the dystopian opus, The Trial (1925) and the comic adventures of The Good Soldier Schweik (1923) .