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.
Old English literature There were considerable losses of manuscripts as a result of the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 16th century.[2] Scholarly study of the language began when the manuscripts were collected by scholars and antiquarians such as Matthew Parker, Laurence Nowell and Sir Robert Bruce Cotton.[8]