A literary prose work of a certain length that tells more or less fictitious events is commonly known as a novel. The length distinguishes it from the story, the fictional character differentiates it from other genres, such as the essay, and finally, her prose writing opposes it to rhymed stories such as poetry. A formal characteristic of the novels that allows it to be distinguished from other related genres is their division of more or less independent chapters, which give rise to a definite and inseparable chronology.
There are different types of novels, since they can be humorous, autobiographical, epistolary (which tell a story through correspondence), customs, installments and many others. In addition, the novel can be classified within genres and subgenres such as dramatic, romantic, police, science fiction, historical, horror. Many works are difficult to catalog in one category or another, since these limits are only a way to facilitate classification for library or storage purposes.
When we talk about the history of the novel we go back to Antiquity, where there were stories of this type in Greece with Homer and in Rome with Virgil, for example. The Middle Ages would see the rise of romances and chivalric novels. Until then, most of the novels were preserved by oral tradition or thanks to the work of copyists, generally priests, who were among the few people who could write manually. The 16th century, with the creation of the printing press, would begin to lay the foundations of the modern novel, of which the greatest exponent is "Don Quixote de la Mancha" by Miguel de Cervantes.
In the following centuries the adventure novels, realistic, sentimental and customs would appear. And thus great authors of novels such as Guy de Maupassant, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens, Fédor Dostoevsky, Jules Verne and others will also emerge. In the 20th century the novel undergoes other enormous experimental transformations that make it evolve to new forms and styles. A clear example of this avant-garde novel is the "Ulysses" by James Joyce or "The metamorphosis of Franz Kafka". This also occurs in Latin America, undoubtedly one of the pillars of the evolution of the modern novel during the 20th century, with the emergence of novelists such as Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa or Julio Cortázar, among others.
Novels of all kinds have been adapted to the big screen, giving birth to great film classics, as happened, to cite one example, with "A Clockwork Orange", an adaptation by filmmaker Stanley Kubrick of a work by Anthony Burgess. Similarly, the growth of the Internet has led to the creation of new resources for accessing novels, such as e-books and PDF document formats.
On the other hand, globalization has allowed the arrival to the western cultural world of texts produced by artists from other cultures, including novels in a format that is traditional to us and also literary genres in which novelistic prose and poetry seem get confused in a way that seems generally atypical to us. This is what happens with many novels by Indian or Chinese authors, as well as with the increasing spread of modern Japanese literature.
Consequently, the novel constitutes a particular literary genre, since its accessibility makes it an optimal resource for the propagation of culture and entertainment. It is interesting to note that the cheaper resources necessary for the production of a novel (in terms of printing) and the current alternative of publication in non-tangible media has allowed an increase in the number of both writers and readers, given that many authors They resort to the dissemination of their content through digital portals. Despite the existence of alternative means of payment, such as those associated with donations or advertising, one of the obstacles of the modern authors of novels it consists of the risk of hacking and, with it, lower levels of profits.
