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Novel&_160;· Poem&_160;· Drama
Short story&_160;· Novella
A novel is a long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century. The further definition of the genre is historically difficult. Most of the criteria (such as artistic merit, fictionality, a design to create an epic totality of life, a focus on history and the individual) are arbitrary and designed to raise further debates over qualities that will supposedly separate great works of literature both from a wider and lower "trivial" production and from the field of true histories. To become part of the literary production novels have to address the discussion of art. The construction of the narrative, the plot, the way reality is created in the work of fiction, the fascination of the character study, and the use of language are usually discussed to show a novel's artistic merits. Most of these requirements were introduced in the 16th and 17th centuries, in order to give fiction a justification outside the field of factual history. The individualism of the presentation makes the personal memoir and the autobiography the two closest relatives among the genres of modern histories. The fictional narrative, the novel's distinct "literary" prose, specific media requirements (the use of paper and print), a characteristic subject matter that creates both intimacy and a typical epic depth can be seen as features that developed with the Western (and modern) market of fiction. The separation of a field of histories from a field of literary fiction fueled the evolution of these features in the last 400 years.
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