Yes, pastoral literature, which emerged during the Renaissance, often depicted an idealized rural life. It featured shepherds and shepherdesses in idyllic landscapes, focusing on themes of love, nature, and simple living. Examples include works by authors like Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser.
One example of an early American Gothic novel is "Wieland" by Charles Brockden Brown, published in 1798. The novel explores themes of psychological terror, religious fanaticism, and the supernatural in early America.
I recall being taught that the oldest English novel is called 'Piers Plowman', written by William Langland in the early 1300's. I'm sure that there are other works that could arguably be called the first.
"Detective novel" is an example of a genre.
Philip Roth won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his novel, American Pastoral (Houghton Mifflin).
A Pastoral poem is one in which country characters, usually shepherds, discuss the big questions about life and love. The notion that simple rural folk have a profound understanding of things comes from idillic literature of ancient Greece and Rome.
A unit of a novel is called a chapter.
The four wheels of the English novel are typically considered to be Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, and Jane Austen. These authors were pioneers in the development of the novel as a literary form in the 18th and early 19th centuries.
A novel written as letters (epistles) is called an epistolary novel.
The precursor to the novel is typically considered to be the early forms of prose fiction, such as epic poems, folk tales, and romances. These early works laid the groundwork for the development of the novel as a distinct literary form in the 18th century.
'Novel' is a common noun or an adjective (there are two uses) and as such, should normally only be capitalised when it is at the start of a sentence (as I have done for this answer). This is the case when it is a noun, as in example 1, or an adjective, as in example 2: 1. I have just finished reading the latest Margaret Atwood novel. 2. That's a novel way of eating cornflakes. It is possible that there is a very specific situation where it should be capitalised; for instance, there is a magazine called Novel, in which case a capital N is correct.
Novel.
Yes. A novel (the book) is called a novel because when they first appeared as a literary form, they were new and different.