Talk:Novella

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"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

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

vs. short story

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

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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On length and relation to short story

Recently I improved the Polish article on novella, using Polish academic sources (definitions of novel in Polish dictionaries and encyclopedias of literature). I noticed a crucial difference between what they say, and what we say here: Polish academia does not seem to talk at all about the length of the novel, i.e. that it is "longer than short story but shorter than a novel" - at least, not in comparison to short story; there is an agreement that novellas are shorter than a novel, but nobody talks about them being longer than a short story. Instead, they focus solely on its style and form, something we discuss here as well under Novella#Characteristics; what I've added to pl wiki is more in depth. Effectively, for Polish scholars, novella seems to be a formalized subtype of a short story (although I couldn't find a source that says so plainly). I also note that this article has sections discussing differences between novella and novel, and a short story. I've written something similar on pl, again - you can see it in pl:nowela, as well as in the pl article on short story, which I also improved, placing in the latter a dedicated section on short story vs novella (pl:Opowiadanie#Opowiadanie_a_nowela). I am hesitant to translate this stuff here, however, as I am not sure if it represents a global view, or Polish (Slavic?) take on what novella is. I have collected some stuff to read but I don't know when I'll find time to look into English sources. If anyone is interested in this topic, please ping me - I'd be happy to discuss this. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 04:11, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This is the English article about the meaning of the English term. There seems to be a clear distinction between the terms as to length only: flash fiction < short story < novelette < novella < novel.—Anita5192 (talk) 05:41, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Anita5192 This is the English article, but this is not - or should not be - about the meaning of the English term. See WP:SYSTEMICBIAS. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 13:39, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]