4.2–Brief History and Evolution of the Novella

The word “novella” is an Italian word meaning “novelty,” and as such, signified a new form of literature when the term first came into use in the fourteenth century. It was not a short story (a form that existed much earlier, arising from fables and parables, as detailed in the preceding chapter), nor was it a novel (a form popularized four centuries later in the eighteenth century and discussed in the following chapter). The term was first applied to texts that today we would not recognize as novellas, such as the collections of related stories in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1349–53) and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1392). Frequently-cited archetypes in literary histories of the novella are Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and Novelle (1828), James’s Daisy Miller (1878) and The Turn of the Screw, Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilich (1886), Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915). Literary overviews often gesture to present-day use of the novella by authors such as King and Ian McEwan. It should be noted that the quote from King that begins this chapter is tongue-in-cheek; it appears in the afterword of his novella collection, two of which inspired the critically-acclaimed films Stand By Me (1986) and Shawshank Redemption (1994).

What you might have noticed in the above history is the prominence of white male authors, particularly those from western Europe (the exception being the U.S. authors King and James, though the latter became a British citizen). These, however, are not the only writers who influenced the novella’s development. Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave (1688) predates many of the commonly-listed archetypal examples and is sometimes labeled as a novella because of its length and focus on the eponymous character. In the late nineteenth century, novellas written by women, notably George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil (1859) in Britain and Louisa May Alcott’s Behind a Mask; or, A Woman’s Power (1866) in the United States, helped shape the form. Among more recent work written by women that has greatly contributed to the novella’s persistence are Nadine Gordimer’s The Late Bourgeois World (1966), Ursula le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest (1976), and Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1984).

The absence of authors in literary histories who are not white men is in part due to the ways that the contributions made by women and people of color have been downplayed or ignored. A prime example is Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig: Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859). While she was one of the first Black Americans to publish a novella, Wilson’s work was largely ignored (for various reasons) until literary critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr. rediscovered and republished her novella in the 1980s. The Awakening provides another example of a work that has received belated scholarly interest. Chopin was a well-known author during her lifetime, but literary scholarship did not rigorously engage with her novellas until the 1950s. Scholars are working to revise our understanding of literary history by reviving discourse on works that have been ignored and by rediscovering texts not in popular circulation (i.e., out of print) in archives. Librarians are also playing a key role by digitizing texts that are out of print or exist in limited physical copies. These efforts allow scholars around the world access to under-researched texts.

An additional issue with the current understanding of the novella is that histories generally focus on Anglophone texts (i.e., in English) or those written in European languages. However, authors around the globe write novellas in many different languages. Before being translated into English, Naguib Mahfouz’s The Beggar (1965) and Haruki Murakami’s The Strange Library (1983) were written in Arabic and Japanese, respectively. Similarly, Chilean author Roberto Bolaño’s The Cowboy Graves: Three Novellas (2017) was originally composed in Spanish. The result of academia’s growing inclusivity, both in who is allowed into scholarly conversations and in the topics of study, has been an increasing awareness and appreciation of the novella in many different languages and cultures.

Further, in recent years, novellas have been gaining popularity with young adult, science fiction, and fantasy authors. These writers are changing the use of the form as well as making it more inclusive. For instance, fantasy author Nghi Vo’s The Empress of Salt and Fortune (2020) features non-binary and queer characters. Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s co-authored This Is How You Lose the Time War (2020) is both science fiction and epistolary, which means it is written as though the characters are corresponding through letters. Okofora’s Binti is the first in a trilogy written for young adult audiences and reimagines the practices of the Himba people, a semi-nomadic group generally located in Namibia, in a futuristic science fiction setting.

Other contemporary authors use the novella form to re-envision worlds crafted in previous literary works. In The Ballad of Black Tom (2016), Victor LaValle challenges the racism present in H. P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Horror at Red Hook” (1927) by rewriting the events from the perspective of a Black man. By contrast, some young adult writers publish additional content about the worlds they have created in the novella form. The novels in the Shatter Me series are primarily written from the perspective of a single protagonist, but their author Tahereh Mafi has also published several companion novellas from other characters’ perspectives. These novellas fill in gaps of the story left out of the novels or narrate the novels’ events from other characters’ points of view. Since the audience is expected to have read the novel series, these novellas can focus intensely on the specific characters’ internal conflicts as opposed to worldbuilding. In doing so, these novellas not only fulfill the general word count expectations that qualify a work as being a novella, but (more importantly) they also adhere to the intense focus of other standalone texts mentioned in this chapter.

The novella continues to evolve as authors innovate the form, and our understanding of the novella—its past, present, and future—continues to expand as scholars are more inclusive of works by a diverse range of authors.