Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2014 December 19

= December 19 =

Novella in English?
Was a work in English ever called a "novella" by its author or its publisher? Contact Basemetal   here  03:35, 19 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Yup. Many works of a length between that of a short story and that of a novel are so described.  Steven King is an author who has written many collections of novellas.  His collection Different Seasons featured four novellas, three of which were turned into films.  You can find many more at Category:Novellas and Wikipedia has an article about novellas at the aptly titled Novella.  -- Jayron 32 03:51, 19 December 2014 (UTC)
 * That shows there are such things as novellas, but the question is whether their authors or publishers ever call them that. There are some hundreds of examples of stories being described as novellas on their title-pages by their publishers (and, it may be, with the consent of their authors) here and here, and some thousands here.--Antiquary (talk) 10:56, 19 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes this was my question. I am well aware that WP applies the term to a certain class of works in English but I wanted to know how much currency that term has outside WP. Thanks to your examples I now know that the term is indeed used in English for works in English. Until now I had always thought that when the term was used in English it always referred to works in languages other than English (French, Italian, Spanish, ...) I am still somewhat puzzled by the use in WP of the term "novella" to describe for e.g. A Christmas Carol. As to e.g. Different Seasons is that how Stephen King himself describes those works? Note that to simply say that a "novella" fits between a "short story" and a "novel" does not completely clarify the matter. Traditionally English "novels" could be quite a bit shorter than e.g. French "romans", so there didn't seem to be a need for such a term. On the other hand when English "short stories" are translated into French they are usually called "nouvelles" (e.g. J. D. Salinger's volume Nine Stories), so the English and the French term do not seem to correspond. The French WP article describes the works in Different Seasons as "romans courts", i.e. "short novels". Whether that is because Stephen King himself described them as "novels" is what I'd like to know. (Why do people refer to Stephen King also as Steven King? Is that a legitimate variant?) Contact Basemetal   here  15:44, 19 December 2014 (UTC)
 * I have no idea how Stephen King describes any of his works, but his official site has a specific section for novellas . BTW, I would suggest this is a variant of Rule 34 (Internet meme). Particularly with modern on demand publishing and ebooks, the field of authors and English works is vast. You can be fairly sure that if the question relates to whether these people describe their work as X, and X is well known enough to have a wikipedia article, the answer is surely yes. Nil Einne (talk) 16:45, 19 December 2014 (UTC)
 * On this site the works in Different Seasons are described both as "novellas" and as "short stories". Contact Basemetal   here  16:48, 19 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Your second point is very important. So I'd like to rephrase the question to "Was a work in English ever called a novella by its author or publisher before 1970?" The web as we know it dates back to about 1990 but a restriction to before 1970 should keep us completely safe. Contact Basemetal   here  16:54, 19 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Re: The Stephen King point, you can see here where Stephen King specifically refers to some of his words as a novella  ('"The Mist" for years and years and years, and he and I had talked again and again about putting an actual ending on the movie, because the ending of the novella is ambiguous'). In the second case, the term has earlier been used by the interviewer multiple times, but there doesn't seem to have been in the first. Nil Einne (talk) 17:03, 19 December 2014 (UTC)
 * The Hugo Award for Best Novella was first awarded in 1968 and the Nebula Award for Best Novella began in 1966. Rmhermen (talk) 17:55, 19 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Which doesn't directly tell us whether an author or publisher called their book a novella but I would agree is an important point. If you take it in concert with my earlier point, authors and publishers aren't some sort of special subclass of people with extremely unorthodox view points by all members. So if the term is widely used in a non derogatory fashion (although often even then), and used enough to even have awards for it, it's rather unlikely no one would want to call their work that term. And we can be fairly certain authors and people involved with publishers were involved in setting up these awards, it's rather unlikely they'd make an award with a title none would want to call their works. Nil Einne (talk) 18:08, 19 December 2014 (UTC)
 * The earliest proof I can find of English-language authors/publishers calling their works "novellas" are Richard Wright Uncle Tom's Children: Four Novellas, and Eric Knight, Helen Hull et al. The Flying Yorkshireman: Novellas. Both date from 1938.  --Antiquary (talk) 11:02, 20 December 2014 (UTC)


 * (EC) As to the before 1970, well even then the number was still quite high. In any case, it's not particularly hard to find examples which show it is the case, e.g. these appear to be have images of genuine original covers all of which have novella on the cover       / / /. I can't guarantee that all of these covers were definitely of editions from before 1970, particularly for the Amazon ones but find it hard to believe none are, particularly as some are first editions and other semi expensive stuff some it's likely the image is intended to be a fair representation of what you're going to get or more likely an image of the actual book for sale. If it's on the original cover, it's very that either the author or someone in the publisher wanted novella in the title, if not both. (There is a slight chance neither really wanted it and it was the best compromise title, but probably not, particularly given the number of likely cases.) Nil Einne (talk) 17:59, 19 December 2014 (UTC)

Thanks to Jayron, Antiquary, Nil Einne and Rmhermen, and particularly to Nil Einne for all this data. The upshot seems to be that the word "novella" has probably been applied in English to works in the English language (even by their authors, etc. not to mention secondary sources) for a lot longer than I thought. Thank God for the WP RD. My doubts arose partly due to the fact that the word "novel" is itself derived from "novella" so "novella" sounded like a later borrowing specifically intended to cover a kind of work typical of some foreign literature. But whatever the history of the use of the word is, it seems that the word "novella" has been fully naturalized into English for works in English since at least the 1960s. Whether next to the "novel" and the "short story" it's become a concept fully on a par with the first two that's something else. Wiktionary defines a "novella" as a "short novel or a long short story". It's still a bit unclear to me how short a novel, or how long a short story can be, before they become a novella. Anyway, leaving that aside, if you're curious about use in English here are some ngrams: novella, novel, novel vs novella. Clearly Ngrams can't tell you if the word "novella" was used for a work in English or in a foreign language, or if "novel" is the noun or the adjective. Contact Basemetal   here  18:52, 19 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Regarding length, Word count gives the cutoff points used for the Nebula Award categories but admits that such boundaries are "arbitrary". Deor (talk) 21:19, 19 December 2014 (UTC)
 * The author of this this book initially called it "two short stories and a novella", then backed down and agreed it was a novel. (I'm just about to read it for the third time. Very few people have read even it for the first time.) You naughty, naughty literary critic, you! Pete AU aka --Shirt58 (talk) 10:32, 22 December 2014 (UTC)

Background checking/fingerprinting and foreign criminal records
If someone had a criminal record in a foreign country, would it come up on a fingerprint background check in the United States? FYI, I do not have a foreign criminal record, I am just curious if illegal immigrants who may be convicted murderers or sex offenders could get jobs in places like schools using someone else's identity. 71.3.165.47 (talk) 04:38, 19 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Surely this would vary based on the thoroughness of the background check. I don't know the extent to which aliens' records are checked upon entering the USA (I'm an American, so the few times I've left the country, returning wasn't a problem), but presumably they'd try to filter out the criminals, perhaps more than the routine background-check companies might, since there's a bit of a national-security interest in keeping out the criminals, as well as an anti-crime interest.  It also depends on the foreign country; poorer and more obscure countries like Chad or Guinea probably aren't as likely to have records accessible to American background-checkers as are richer and more prominent countries such as Canada or Japan.  Nyttend (talk) 00:19, 21 December 2014 (UTC)

How do I navigate the Quran?
Whenever I see a Quran, I am intimidated by its volume of text. The bound book is thick. I usually find them written in Arabic or English with the original Arabic script, and I still would have no idea what it's about. Unlike the Bible, where I would have some cultural awareness due to learning about biblical events by watching TV or listening to common hearsay, the Quran is completely foreign to me, except for a few verses that people cite when they make comparisons of narratives between the biblical account and the quranic account. Also, just by speaking English and being a curious thinker, I often get surprised at the various biblical origins of many English terms and phrases (i.e. "Man does not live by janitorial services alone" from Martha Speaks). Again, this really helps with my working knowledge of Christianity and the Bible to some extent.That said, the comparisons make me aware that the Quran has very similar narratives as the Bible, yet they seem different in a way. Are there any English-language picture books about the Quran or some easy guidebooks on how to read the Quran for absolute beginners who are completely oblivious to Islamic culture? I wish there is an Islamic version of DK Publishing's The Illustrated Bible Story by Story. That book was a very helpful walk-through of every story in the Bible. I realize that the Quran is not composed of stories, but a walk-through would still be nice. 71.79.234.132 (talk) 07:36, 19 December 2014 (UTC)


 * First off, the Qur'an is much shorter than the Christian Bible (i.e. old + new testaments). However, it's not particularly arranged in a manner that's conducive to "cold" reading from beginning to end, since the Fatiha prayer is placed as the first chapter (sura), while the other chapters are arranged roughly in order of decreasing length, with the longest near the beginning and the shortest near the end.  The more useful distinction is between the earlier Meccan suras (generally on morality and the nature of religion) and the later Medinan suras (generally more preoccupied with legal matters).  There are no real historical books (such as Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles in the Bible), and not too much overall sequential structuring or narrative order (the way that the events in the Bible can generally be laid out along a timeline beginning with the Creation and ending with Paul's arrival in Rome) -- and versions of Biblical stories which have found their way into the Qur'an are usually radically transformed (partially based on post-Biblical Christian and Jewish folklore)... AnonMoos (talk) 12:49, 19 December 2014 (UTC)


 * The Quran is difficult to understand without knowing the context of the (supposed) revelations. While the Bible more or less provides its own context through historical narrative, the Quran assumes that listeners/readers are already familiar with the characters and concepts it discusses. Remember that the Quran is not actually a book, in the sense that it was not collected in book form by the author (Muhammad was illiterate). Knowledge of the Bible is helpful at least in the sense that many Biblical figures are mentioned in the Quran without any introduction. However, the most important aspect, I believe, is to know about Muhammad's life. Remember that all verses of the Quran were revealed to Muhammad because they were relevant to him or his audience at that particular time. Reading a biography of Muhammad, or at least an outline of his life before you read the Quran will probably be very helpful. And that brings us to the point raised by AnonMoos above: the traditional ordering of the Quran is mostly arbitrary and not really helpful. Reading it in chronological order (i.e. in the order that Muhammad recited it) will reveal a progression that corresponds to Muhammad's career. While the chronology of the Quran is complicated and not precisely known, this website provides a reasonable attempt (based on secondary sources) at giving the chronological order of the Quranic chapters. - Lindert (talk) 13:43, 19 December 2014 (UTC)
 * I attempted to read the Book of Mormon. That failed, because I had no idea what just happened. And seeing that there is no historical evidence for the Book of Mormon, there is no way I can use the cultural background to understand the text. Doing a "cold reading" of the Bible without prior knowledge of Judaism or Christianity, in my experience, just brings confusion and boredom. TV and movie adaptations of biblical stories, on the other hand, make the stories more exciting, meaningful, and coherent, because they may take information from extrabiblical sources that connect the dots. 71.79.234.132 (talk) 19:43, 20 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Ah, that's helpful. There is also this website called "www.ask-a-muslim.com". It publishes numerous introductory articles on the basics of the Muslim religion, because its goal is to promote awareness and understanding of Islam. 71.79.234.132 (talk) 14:42, 19 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Lindert's probably got the best plan for reading it like the Bible, though a friend of mine read the Quran backwards (that is, read the last Sura, the next to last, and so on to the second, then the first) because it just got easier and easier to read.
 * Another possibility is the Hadith, the sayings of Muhammad. It's not part of the Quran, but has more narrative than the Quran, but there's about a dozen volumes, several Sunni and the rest Shia.  Ian.thomson (talk) 15:04, 19 December 2014 (UTC)
 * AnonMoos, you have given the most succinct formal description of Quran vs. the Bible. I doubt a Muslim could do such a fine job. Bravo! Omidinist (talk) 19:15, 19 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Do tell, why can't a Muslim give a proper description of the Quran vs the Bible? I'm just asking as the way you said that one would mistake you as being Islamophobic. 76.68.49.155 (talk) 23:29, 19 December 2014 (UTC)
 * I think it was meant as high praise of AnonMoos's description rather than an insult to Muslims. It could have been worded better, perhaps with "many Muslims" instead.  Ian.thomson (talk) 23:33, 19 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Then you would support him saying that he doubts many Christians could give a proper description? 76.68.49.155 (talk) 00:12, 20 December 2014 (UTC)
 * It is obvious you are trying to twist what was said. He didn't say " proper " but " better ". "Many Muslims could not give a better description" means that it is a very good description indeed. Everybody understood until you came along and started trying to make some politically correct point about supposed "Islamophobia", not hesitating to twist his words in order to achieve that. Contact Basemetal   here  00:27, 20 December 2014 (UTC)
 * That was a great explanation, I doubt many Americans could have come up with such a great answer. 76.68.49.155 (talk) 02:09, 20 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Ok. Let me spell it out. To say that "you doubt many Muslims could give a better description" implies that you think Muslims in general would be able to give a very good explanation but that that person was able to give an explanation that was just as good. Far from disparaging Muslims it in fact acknowledges that they would in general be able to better describe the Quran vs the Bible than Christians, that is that Muslims would tend to know (about) the Bible better than Christians (about) the Quran. I don't know if that is true but that's what Omidinist's statement implies. If that's not clear how about this: "I doubt that many professional violinists could play this piece better that this guy (who happens to not be a professional violinist)". Would such a statement be intended to disparage "professional violinists", according to you? Or would it in fact acknowledge that many would play that piece very well but that that guy can play just as well. Not sure how much point there is arguing this in good faith but it's mostly for the bystanders. Contact Basemetal   here  02:39, 20 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Not sure I deserve an encomium for such a brief summary-of-summaries, but Omidinist is a native Persian (Farsi) speaker, and presumably Muslim or of Muslim background... AnonMoos (talk) 04:02, 20 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Please notice the wording. I said 'the most succinct formal description of...' I think a Muslim would do the job either more expansively or less informatively. Omidinist (talk) 08:43, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

I don't get this question. I found the Qur'an a very quick skim - it only took less than 40 minutes or so - whereas I gave up skimming the Old and the New Testament several times. The Qur'an is incredibly repetitive, mostly about devotion to Allah, and doesn't say much. You can skim it for yourself:

[1] http://www.nooresunnat.com/Audio/Complete%20Quran/Quran%20Translation%20in%20English%20by%20Mufti%20Taqi%20Usmani%20Sb%20DB.pdf (PDF)

or

[2] http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2800/pg2800.txt [a text file]

An hour from now, you can say you've skimmed the whole of the Qur'an - every word, at least in the English translation. 91.120.14.30 (talk) 09:30, 23 December 2014 (UTC)

Bolshevik statistics
What was the official membership (either precise or approximate) of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (bolsheviks) (the Communist Party) at the time of the October Revolution? Given that this was the turning point in the Party's history, I expect that it's well documented somewhere. History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union says that membership was 240,000 at the Sixth Party Congress, which began in late July, but Party membership had tripled (just like elephants!) since April, so presumably it was a good deal larger by October.

Second question: do we have any clue how many pre-October Revolution members of the Party outlived Stalin? Obviously some did, even rank-and-file (I remember reading a 1980s book that interviewed a then-living old man who had been an ordinary member in 1917), but it's got to be a small percentage. Old Bolshevik doesn't give statistics later than 1924. The intro in our article on Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich claims that he was the last survivor, dying a few months before the end of the USSR.

Nyttend (talk) 19:07, 19 December 2014 (UTC)