Novella
A novella is a short prose fiction, derived from the Italian word for new.
In English, a novella consists of stories mid-way—in terms of length and complexity—between a short story and a novel, focusing on a single
chain of events with a surprising turning point. Robert
Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) are examples of novellas in English.
The origin of the novella genre can be linked to Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), author of The Decameron. The Decameron is
a collection of novellas, a series of one hundred tales told by ten individuals fleeing the plague.
The Hugo and Nebula
awards for science fiction define the novella as "A...story of
between seventeen thousand five hundred (17,500) and forty thousand (40,000) words."
It is common for longer novellas to be referred to as novels, if incorrectly. The aforementioned Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde and Heart of Darkness, for example, are commonly referred to as novels and published as such, as are many
science fiction works such as War of the Worlds and Armageddon 2419 A.D.
In German the English term novella is called Novelle and novel is named Roman. Therefore in German
there is less confusion between the two types of literature, and novel is much more established as an important form of
fiction. An example carrying the term in its own title is Stefan Zweig's "Die Schanovelle" ("The Check Novel").
See also: literature
Novella is a commune of the Haute-Corse département in France, on the island
of Corsica.
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