Talk:Novella

Remove reference to Spanish TV's novelas?
Are novelas, or telenovelas relevant enough to be included in this article? The spelling of the word novella is not even the same as the spelling of novela, which was previously spelled incorrectly as novella (which I fixed in the article). --SaulPerdomo 21:29, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

-Neither the emo song nor the Spanish television format are relevant to the article. I've removed them.

novellas??
The article says derives from the Italian word "novella" (plural: "novelle" or "novellas"). What is it referring to?? In Italian the only plural form is novelle. If novellas indicates the English plural, it should be distinguished from talking about Italian.

193.226.250.74 15:34, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

"Autobiographical Novella"
I have deleted the section on the "Autobiographical Novella," which is not a term of art in wide usage; some novellas may be autobiographical (such as Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It) but the definition contained in the article--that it "is a work that is part fictional novel, part autobiography, with the distinction between the two left to the reader"--was ridiculous. James Frey's book A Million Little Pieces is not an "autobiographical novella," it is a false memoir, or, at best, a semi-autobiographical novel. Same for Wilkomirski's Fragments. There is no such literary form as the "autobiographical novella"--a novella can be autobiographical, just as a novel can. But it is not a distinct genre with its own rules, as the prior definition implied. -- Liatjamie 4/22/06

Quotes or italics
I know this isn't officially the place to discuss this, but I couldn't find the part of the WP:MOS where this is supposedly codified: that WP style is to italicize the titles of novellas. I wonder if that it something we might want to rethink.

First off, I think it's clear that italicizing or putting quotes around a title is not a way of showing respect or disrespect to some art forms. It's not because we believe feature films are superior to sonnets that we italicize one and not the other. So don't think I'm trying to insult the novella by thinking that quote marks would be more helpful than italics.

The reason I think it would be helpful is that the determination is generally made by whether the art form is generally part of another form. Like, songs are in quotes and albums are in italics. This is useful, because it allows you to distinguish between art works and collections that have the same name (e.g., "Let It Be" and Let It Be').

Novellas, of course, are generally packaged together with one or more other novellas, and/or with short stories. Sometimes the collection has the same name as the novella--e.g., At the Mountains of Madness is a collection that includes At the Mountains of Madness.

Wouldn't it be preferable to avoid this problem by putting novellas in quotation marks? Nareek 05:18, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

"# 2 Novella versus novel" - needs to be more TO THE POINT
"# 2 Novella versus novel" - this needs to be more TO THE POINT - it gives TOO MUCH detail if anything and it's hard to understand/read for the average person - could someone just put at the bottom of the section what the real difference is? - thanks 172.142.242.18 14:12, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Respects to the distinction (novel, novella, short story)
Hello! I've a few observations:

- There is a Hungarian (or maybe East-European - I'm not sure) expression: little novel. Different to the concept novella and novel. How can I translate it to English?

I would like to put some question in connection with this:

- How long is the time of the plot's happenings?

- How many localities are there in the writing?

- How many points of view has the narrator?

- How difficult is the web of motivations?

And now please help to redifine the three (plus one) categories. --Tiny hungarian (talk) 15:26, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I'd suggest short novel. It's a matter of word count first, then complexity of structure. Other factors -- the number of characters and length of time elapsed -- are not important. Xanthoxyl (talk) 16:36, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

a novella is a hard working subject
'Italic text'Italic text'Italic text'Italic text'Italic text'Italic text'Italic text''' —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.27.124.236 (talk) 01:36, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Chapters
The blanket statement "Unlike novels, they are not divided into chapters" is simply wrong. Some novellas are divided into chapters, for instance Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. (And some novels are not divided into chapters, for instance the Discworld novels.) I don't even know whether it's true that most novellas are or are not divided into chapters (something it would be difficult to research, given the haziness of the boundaries). 91.105.37.184 (talk) 02:01, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

French terminology

 * In French "novella" is nouvelle (but a "nouvelle" is actually a short story, not a novella) or, maybe better, "récit" - and "novel" is roman

This is unclear and even contradictory. Would it be more accurate to say that French does not have distinct terminology corresponding to "short story", "novelette" and "novella", but uses the words "nouvelle" and "récit" for all three? My reading of a few Google search results for "nouvelle roman longeur" suggests that this is the case, but I defer to native speakers of French with knowledge of French literary theory...

The French Wikipedia article "nouvelle" has a transwiki link to this article, not to the English articles on "short story" or "novelette". For the comparative semantics this article's list of other-language equivalents deals with, this passage is significant:


 * Dans les pays anglo-saxons (et aux États-Unis en particulier), on considère que la nouvelle peut se classifier en trois catégories suivant sa longueur. L'organisation Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America en a donné une définition : l'histoire courte (short story) compte moins de 7 500 mots, la novelette comprend les histoires entre 7 500 et 17 499 mots, et la novella, presque un roman, comprend les histoires entre 17 500 et 40 000 mots.

Other than that, the article says little about prose fiction forms w.r.t. their length. --Jim Henry (talk) 01:27, 9 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Yes, in French, short story and novella are often used interchangeably - but even though there is no clear definition, there is still a common usage: if the story is only a couple pages long for example, no one would call it "nouvelle", instead it'd be called "histoire courte" (short story). Only if the text is a bit longer it'd be called a "nouvelle", just like in English (Maupassant's Horla for example, is known as a "nouvelle", not "histoire courte").


 * For this reason, I think "novella" should link to the French article "Nouvelle". Unfortunately, I can't add this transwiki, since the article short story already links there...


 * Does anyone knows how to change that?


 * --Wikizen (talk 18:34, 4 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Hello, Wikizen. You would need to apply to Interwiki conflicts quoting the number of the short story article link and explain that the articles shouldn't be merged, but actually refer to the same concept, therefore should correlate with both articles in English. I would do this on your behalf but, as I am not a French speaker, I can't confidently assure the admins that this is the case. Best! --Iryna Harpy (talk) 22:15, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

Inappropriate and misused term
The word novella is deprecated in modern Italian, it is rather used in reference to pre-modern literature (that is, between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance), instead the term racconto is presently used; similarly, apart from a little group of English "academics", the British English terms used today are either short story or tale; I don't understand what game is playing people here, and, with all due respect, it's not my business, I can't follow this peculiar topic due to lack of time; however each time I will need to save a page, I will just replace (in my personal files, not here) novella with tale .Jorgen W (talk) 19:24, 12 September 2011 (UTC)
 * It doesn't matter if the word novella is used in modern Italian, what matters is how it is used in English. No one is playing any game, novella is used to decribe books longer than a short story, but shorter than a novel. It's not an academic term, it's used by the publishing industry. And it is worth noting that at the tale disambiguation page, none of the articles use the term tale in the sense that you claim it is used.--RLent (talk) 20:29, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

Reference Links Out Of Date
Many of the 2009/2010 reference links no longer take viewers to pertinent information. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.42.101.150 (talk) 21:35, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

Notable Examples
So, Joseph Conrad, Philip Roth, John Steinbeck, Truman Capote, and... Brandon Sanderson? Yeah. Really? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2620:0:290F:E6:ECAA:700E:BAEE:7B53 (talk) 21:15, 22 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Indeed, that does seem to be an out-of-place bit of puffery for a currently-working author. 76.180.144.72 (talk) 05:22, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Reference Clearance
References 1 and 4 point to the same internet address and thus should be merged. (Concerns this version.) --78.50.213.156 (talk) 14:06, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Decameron reference in history section misleading
The beginning of the history section reads: "The novella as a literary genre which began developing in the early Renaissance literary work of Italian and French literatura, principally by Giovanni Boccaccio, author of The Decameron...".

(By the way, shouldn't this be "The novella as a literary genre which began..."? However, this is not my main point.)

It seems to me that there is some confusion here, which revolves around the different meaning of the word "novella" in ancient Italian and modern English. In Italian (which is my native language) "novella" has the generic meaning of "a story which is not too long" and is essentially an archaic term, very rarely used in modern speech or writing; the stories contained in The Decameron are still called "novelle" ("novelle" is plural, the singular is "novella") just for historical reasons. In modern English, by contrast, "novella" has a rather specialized meaning, which is the very subject of this article.

Now, my point is that the stories in The Decameron are not "novelle" at all, in the modern English sense: with a typical word count of 2000-5000 words, they are rather "short stories". So, in the end, while the reference to the Decameron is correct (as far as I know) from an etimological point of view, the sentence I quoted in the first line is false (or at least incorrect): it is a bit of a stretch to say that the novella literary genre began developing in a work which does not contain a single novella, in the modern sense of the word. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.41.33.90 (talk) 11:09, 22 August 2015 (UTC)


 * I totally concur. I think the etymological development of the word "novella" is being conflated with the development of the genre described by the English literary term "novella." Both may be of interest to the reader, but they need to be disentangled. The history section needs to be completely rewritten. None of the early examples are novellas, or even precursors to novellas, in the sense referred to by the English term. Schoolmann (talk) 16:12, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

vs. short story
Why is there no section contrasting it to the short story? Kdammers (talk) 14:06, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

List of short stories, novelettes, novellas, novels by word length
Is there any reference list, on Wikipedia or elsewhere, that lists works of fiction and gives their word counts? I am interested in compiling an anthology of shortish fictional works, and would like to be able to look up their length without tedious legwork. --Haruo (talk) 20:56, 12 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I looked a little. You may not find it. It looks like page count is more often cited. Besides the criteria are a bit arbitrary... So I think, personally, once you get to 30k or 40k, you are closer to novel territory. --Bod (talk) 20:49, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

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