The early development
of the English novel
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.
The present English (and Spanish) word derives from the Italian novella for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the Latin novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of novellus, diminutive of novus, meaning "new". Most European languages have preserved the term "romance" (as in French and German "Roman", and in Portuguese "Romance") for extended narratives.
The English and Spanish decisions came with the 17th-century fashion of shorter exemplary histories. See the chapters "Petites histoires" or "novels", 1600–1740 and The words "novel" and "romance" in the following.
A significant number of extended fictional prose works predate the novel, and have been cited as its antecedents. While these anticipate the novel in form and, to some extent, in substance, the early European novelists were unaware of most of these works; instead they were influenced by novellas and verse epics
The European tradition of the novel as the genre of extended prose fiction is rooted in the tradition of medieval "romances". Even today, most European languages make that clear by using the word roman roughly the way that English uses the word novel. The word novel claims roots in the European novella. Yet, epic length or the focus on a central hero giving the work its name (as in Robinson Crusoe or Oliver Twist) are features derived from the tradition of "romances". The early modern novel had preferred titles that focused on curious examples of modern life, not on heroes.
The term novel refers back to the production of short stories that remained part of a European oral culture of storytelling into the late 19th century. Fairy tales, jokes, little funny stories designed to make a point in a conversation, the exemplum a priest would insert in a sermon belong into this tradition. Written collections of such stories circulated in a wide range of products from practical compilations of examples designed for the use of clerics to such poetic cycles as Boccaccio's Decameron (1354) and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1386–1400).
The 18th-century rise of the novel is a compound of several stories.
One is a story of statistics. English readers of the late 17th century and early 18th century were offered a total of some 2,000 to 3,000 titles per year. The numbers had risen dramatically after the abolition of the Star Chamber in 1641. The simple title count gives, however, a distorted picture as it places theological and political pamphlets of short term effect on the same level with editions of books printed to sell over several years. Statistics of the French and German markets have their own distortions: French numbers are comparatively higher due to the fact that Dutch publishers (re-)printed French books for the international market. French was Europe's lingua franca and the language of international politics and fashions. Germany's book trade was large but divided between Protestant and Catholic states. The former had arranged for a wider exchange at Leipzig's fairs. The academic production in Latin was comparatively large on the continent due to the importance continental universities had gained as providers of careers.
Literature in the modern sense was of marginal importance all over Europe until the end of the 18th century. In the Western markets some two to five percent of the total production fell into the categories of poetry and dubious or elegant historical works that were later united under the new heading literature. To give the numbers for the English production: The fictional output remained here at 20 to 60 titles per year in the beginning of the 18th century depending on how one accounts for the wider market of histories. French, German and Dutch statistics are comparable. The eastern and southern European neighbors largely subscribed to the international market.
The Western European output of literature in the modern sense rose significantly in the course of the 18th century; the growth rates stabilised in the 1740s. A change in the public appreciation supported that growth and was reflected by the growing media coverage of new works.
By the 1680s the fashionable political European production had inspired a second wave of private scandalous publications and generated new productions of local importance. Women authors reported on politics and on their private love affairs in The Hague and in London. German students imitated them and used the relative anonymity they enjoyed in far smaller towns like Jena, Halle and Leipzig, to boast of their private amours in fiction. The market of the metropolis London, the anonymous international market of the Netherlands, the urban markets of Hamburg and Leipzig generated new public spheres. Once private individuals – students of university towns and daughters of London's upper class posing on the title pages anonymously under announcements like "Written by a Young Lady" – began to use the novel as platform on which they could openly reevaluate their questionable reputations, the public began to call for a reformation of manners.