page_title: Novel
section_title: Genre fiction
hierarchical_section_title: Novel / The 20th century and later / Genre fiction
caption_attribution_description: English: J.K. Rowling reads from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone at the Easter Egg Roll at the White House in 2010. Español: J.K. Rowling leyendo Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal durante una visita a la Casa Blanca el 5 de abril de 2010.
context_page_description: A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, normally written in prose form, and which is typically published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction 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".
  Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, John Cowper Powys, preferred the term "romance" to describe their novels.
  According to Margaret Doody, the novel constitutes "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, in Chivalric romance, and in the tradition of the Italian renaissance novella. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, especially the historical romances of Walter Scott and the Gothic novel. Some, including M. H. Abrams and Walter Scott, have argued that a novel is a fiction narrative that displays a realistic depiction of the state of a society, while the romance encompasses any fictitious narrative that emphasizes marvellous or uncommon incidents.
context_section_description: While the reader of so-called serious literature will follow public discussions of novels, popular fiction production employs more direct and short-term marketing strategies by openly declarating of the work's genre. Popular novels are based entirely on the expectations for the particular genre, and this includes the creation of a series of novels with an identifiable brand name. e.g. the Sherlock Holmes series by Arthur Conan Doyle
  Popular literature holds a larger market share. Romance fiction had an estimated $1.375 billion share in the US book market in 2007. Inspirational literature/religious literature followed with $819 million, science fiction/fantasy with $700 million, mystery with $650 million and then classic literary fiction with $466 million.
  Genre literature might be seen as the successor of the early modern chapbook. Both fields share a focus on readers who are in search of accessible reading satisfaction. The twentieth century love romance is a successor of the novels Madeleine de Scudéry, Marie de La Fayette, Aphra Behn, and Eliza Haywood wrote from the 1640s into the 1740s. The modern adventure novel goes back to Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and its immediate successors. Modern pornography has no precedent in the chapbook market but originates in libertine and hedonistic belles lettres, of works like John Cleland's Fanny Hill (1749) and similar eighteenth century novels. Ian Fleming's James Bond is a descendant of the anonymous yet extremely sophisticated and stylish narrator who mixed his love affairs with his political missions in La Guerre d'Espagne (1707). Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon is influenced by Tolkien, as well as Arthurian literature, including its nineteenth century successors. Modern horror fiction also has no precedent on the market of chapbooks but goes back to the elitist market of early nineteenth century Romantic literature. Modern popular science fiction has an even shorter history, from the 1860s.
  The authors of popular fiction tend to advertise that they have exploited a controversial topic and this is a major difference between them and so-called elitist literature. Dan Brown, for example, discusses, on his website, the question whether his Da Vinci Code is an anti-Christian novel. And because authors of popular fiction have a fan community to serve, they can risk offending literary critic. However, the boundaries between popular and serious literature have blurred in recent years, with postmodernism and poststructuralism, as well as by adaptation of popular literary classics by the film and television industries.
  Crime became a major subject of 20th and 21st century genre novelists and crime fiction reflects the realities of modern industrialized societies. Crime is both a personal and public subject: criminals each have their personal motivations; detectives, see their moral codes challenged. Patricia Highsmith's thrillers became a medium of new psychological explorations. Paul Auster's New York Trilogy (1985–1986) is an example of experimental postmodernist literature based on this genre.
  Fantasy is another major area of commercial fiction, and a major example is J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (1954/55), a work originally written for young readers that became a major cultural artefact. Tolkien in fact  revived the tradition of European epic literature in the tradition of Beowulf, the North Germanic Edda and the Arthurian Cycles.
  Science fiction, is another important type of genre fiction and it has developed in a variety of ways, ranging from the early, technological adventure Jules Verne had made fashionable in the 1860s, to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) about Western consumerism and technology. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) deals with totalitarianism and surveillance, among other matters, while Stanisław Lem, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke produced modern classics which focus on the interaction between humans and machines. The surreal novels of Philip K Dick such as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch explore the n
caption: J. K. Rowling, 2010
exif: {"Image Copyright": "\u00a9 2010 Daniel Ogren Photography", "Image ExifOffset": "2144", "Image Padding": "[]", "EXIF Padding": "[]"}