Remember that in exchange for forty-four hours plus of classroom instruction, you will need to reread, study more, take better notes, and annotate what you read. Read the poems out loud and if at all possible view the plays after you have read them, or at least read them out loud. The text is excellent and should have everything that you need except the notes about the novel which follow. Remember you have a glossary in your text.
A novel is a fictional prose narrative of substantial length. A short novel is also referred to as a novelette. The novel has roots in the epic poem because it places fictional characters in fictional settings. It is also influenced by the history, the memoir, and the biography. It usually presents a world close to our own. The romance (c. 2nd c.b.c.) emphasizes observable details of like and realistic characters. In the 18th and 19th centuries, novels were separated from romances based on the probability of the setting. Novels are expected to be believable.
Novels use the fiction elements. When one element is developed over another, a particular type of novel is created. For example, emphasis on character is called a Kunstlerroman. If the novel focuses specifically on the civilization of the hero, it is called a Bildungsroman. A rite de passage is a coming of age novel. A psychological novel also focuses on character and may use stream of consciousness style (google Ulysses by James Joyce for an example), or interior monologue. Historical or campus novels emphasize setting; detective novels, thrillers, and adventure novels emphasize plot; problem novels emphasize conflict. Emphasis on structure may create an epistolary novel, one developed through letters, or a picaresque novel where the novel is unified through the adventures of the picaro, or rogue hero. A historical novel where the people are disguised is called a roman a clef, a novel with a key.
Cervante's Don Quixote published in 1605 is generally accepted as the first novel. The first English novel is Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719). Charles Dickens is credited with popularizing the novel and contributing to the standardization of its conventions. In the 20th century types of novels proliferated along with experimentation with the conventions. Stream of consciousness style and the anti-novel (Absurdist) are examples of new directions in the Modernist and Post-Modernist periods.
Two additional terms to know in relation to the novel are framing device, which allows the author to present a series of stories as a unified whole rather than as a collection of independent stories. In The Canterbury Tales, by Chaucer, the framing device is that a group of pilgrims are journeying from London to Canterbury Cathedral passing the time by taking turns telling stories. Between the stories are comments and reactions of the characters. Besides this famous poem, two novels that use framing devices are The Joy Luck Club and An American Quilt. The second term is circular plot. This indicates that a novel begins in a particular place and time with certain characters and returns to the same place, time, and characters at the end.