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A novella is a short Novel ; a narrative work of Prose Fiction somewhat longer than a Short Story but shorter than a novel. A common length is about 50 to 100 pages. The extra length is generally used for more Character Development than is possible in a short story, but without the much greater character and Plot development of a novel. Novellas often are characterized by satire or moral teaching. Although the novella is a common Literary Genre in several European Language s, it is rarely used in English. Americans generally would be most familar with the novellas of Franz Kafka , particularly '' The Metamorphosis '' and '' In The Penal Colony '', or George Orwell 's '' Animal Farm ''. Like the suggests, novellas originally were news of town and country life worth repeating for amusement and edification. HISTORY As a literary Genre , the novella's origin lay in the early Renaissance literary work of the Italians and the French . Principally, by Giovanni Boccaccio ( 1313 – 1375 ), author of '' The Decameron '' ( 1353 )—one hundred novelle told by ten people, seven women and three men, fleeing the Black Death by escaping from Florence to the Fiesole hills, in 1348 ; and by the French Queen , Marguerite De Navarre ( 1492 – 1549 ), Marguerite de Valois, et. alii. , author of '' Heptaméron '' ( 1559 )—seventy-two original French tales (structured like ''The Decameron''). Her psychological acuity and didactic purpose outweigh the unfinished collection's weak literary style. Not until the late , but surprising end; ''Novellen'' tend to contain a concrete symbol, which is the Narration's steady point. NOVELLA VERSUS NOVEL In German and Dutch , the English word for "novella" is ''Novelle'', and the English word for "novel" is the German or Dutch ''Roman'' (except that Dutch does not use initial capitals). It is the same in French , where "novella" is ''nouvelle'' and "novel" is ''roman''. This etymological distinction avoids confusion of the literatures and the forms, with the novel being the more important, established fictional form. The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig 's ( 1881 - 1942 ) '' Die Schachnovelle '' (1942) (literally, "The Chess Novella", but translated in 1944 as ''The Royal Game'') is an example of a title naming its genre. Commonly, longer novellas are addressed as novels; though incorrectly, '' Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde '' and '' Heart Of Darkness '' are called novels, as are many Science Fiction works such as '' The War Of The Worlds '' and '' Armageddon 2419 A.D. ''. Occasionally, longer works are addressed as novellas, with some academics positing 100,000 words as the novella‒novel threshold. In the Science Fiction genre, the Hugo and Nebula literary awards define the novella as: "A… story of between seventeen thousand, five hundred (17,500) and forty thousand (40,000) words." Stephen King , in his introduction to '' Different Seasons '', an anthology of four of his novellas, has called the novella "an ill-defined and disreputable literary banana republic"; King notes the difficulties of selling a novella in the commercial publishing world, since it does not fit the typical length requirements of either magazine or book publishers. Other authors disagree; in the introduction to a novella anthology titled ''Sailing to Byzantium'', Robert Silverberg writes: ''" novella is one of the richest and most rewarding of literary forms...it allows for more extended development of theme and character than does the short story, without making the elaborate structural demands of the full-length book. Thus it provides an intense, detailed exploration of its subject, providing to some degree both the concentrated focus of the short story and the broad scope of the novel."''(Silverberg, vii) REFERENCE:
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