When and where was the novel born?

Answer 1

The earliest of novels were not just born out of imagination and fancy but were chronicles of actual events in history. When viewed from this angle, cave illustrations in Cro-Magnon in France must be considered as the first novels created by man. The word novel just means new, denoting that it was a new form of literary writings, distinguished from every other one, though the word novel had not been affixed on this new form of literature for a long time. This kind of literature existed for a long time in the history and civilization of man but the word novel is new. We can logically assume that historical novels were the earliest ones. When Homer wrote The Iliad about the Trojan War in BC 800, it indeed served the purpose of what a novel is supposed to function like. Novel is supposed to be a long narration of a story in prose, most probably fictional, and the earliest of historical chronicles conformed to this definition, except that they were not completely fictional. But which novel even today is purely fictional, totally devoid of real events, incidents and characters?

Though poetry dates back 4000 years with The Oral Epic Of Gilgamesh in Babylonia written around 2000 BC and drama in existence before 2500 years with Oresteia in Greece in 458 B.C., novel is comparatively a new form of literature, making its advent in this world in the proper form only before a 1000 years, in Rome, India and Japan. The earliest was Satyricon in Rome in Latin written by Petronius in 50 A.D. In the 6th and 7th centuries A.D., there were excellent novels in India in Sanskrit such as Kadambari written by Banabhatta. Tale of Genji written in Japanese by Murasaki Shikibu in the 11th century was an oriental classic. Novels were in the past called romances and therefore there were novels even in the middle ages. In the 17th and 18th centuries, there have been many scholarly books, analyzing the form, aim and function of novels. So, there were evidently many famous and popular novels existing in the Middle Ages. Decameron by Boccaccio in 1354 and Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer in 1386 can be considered excellent story novels, though written in the poetic form which was standard then among scholars. Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory published in 1471 marked the beginning of Renaissance period novels. Invention of printing and paper in the 15th century certainly prompted the establishment on novel as a prominent form of literature. Don Quixote written by Miguel Cervantes and published in 1605 is considered as the first modern day novel though this kind and form of literature had been in existence since the time of Jesus Christ. Or was even The Bible also a novel?

Modern critics who have formed definite definitions for novels, limiting their purview to only prose fiction with more than 50,000 words, but consider it to be appearing in the proper form only in the 18th century.

Answer 2

The novel as a literary genre was born in the 18th century in Europe, particularly in England. The novel is considered to have originated with works like Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" (1719) and Samuel Richardson's "Pamela" (1740).