the novel emerged as a distinct form of literature in europe during the
Novel The genre has been described as having "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years,"[1] with its origins in classical Greece and Rome, in medieval and early modern romance, and in the tradition of the novella. The latter, an Italian word for a short story to distinguish it from a novel, has been used in English since the 18th century for a work that falls somewhere in between. Ian Watt, in The Rise of the Novel, suggested in 1957 that the novel first came into being in the early 18th century.