The Novella: A Global History

Shorter than a novel but longer than a short story, the novella is one of the major prose forms in global literary culture today. This course takes students through almost seven centuries of cultural history to understand the novella's evolution into its now recognizable form. We begin with early examples, including stories from Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron and Miguel de Cervantes's Exemplary Novellas, and then move on to modern works such as Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, and Elena Ferrante's Days of Abandonment. How do formal categories like character and plot operate in a genre that is out of step with our normal sense of narrative scale? How have external conditions in literary culture—for instance, the emergence of mass magazines at the end of the nineteenth century and the rise of the creative writing program after World War II—influenced the writing of novellas? What even is a novella? What unifies this unruly tradition? These sorts of questions guide us as we grapple with thirteen classic novellas over the course of the semester.