Novel is a literary genre that focuses on portraying characters and reflects social life through complete story and environmental description. Character, plot and environment are the three elements of a novel. The plot generally includes four parts: beginning, development, climax and ending, and some also include prologue and ending. Environment includes natural environment and social environment.
Novels can be divided into novels, novellas, short stories and mini-novels according to their length and capacity. According to the performance content, it can be divided into myth, xian Xia, martial arts, ancient biography, contemporary and so on. According to the system, it can be divided into chapter novels, diary novels, epistolary novels and autobiographical novels.
According to language forms, it can be divided into classical Chinese novels and vernacular novels. Novel, poetry, prose and drama are called the four major literary genres. The methods of portraying characters in novels include psychological description, action description, language description, appearance description and expression description. At the same time, novel is a way of writing. The word "novel" first appeared in Zhuangzi's exterior novels as a county magistrate, which was far from Dada. Zhuangzi's so-called novel refers to trivial remarks, which is far from the concept of novel.
Until Huan Tan's new theory in the Eastern Han Dynasty: Novelists combine small words, take metaphors, make simple books, manage their bodies and families, and have quite a few words. After the ban, the ancient Han and Shu. Yi classifies novelists into ten categories, which are defined as: novelists, created by officials, created by gossip and created by hearsay.
Just slightly similar to the meaning of the novel. The biggest feature of China's novels is that there are two different novel systems, classical Chinese novels and vernacular novels, since the Song Dynasty. China's classical novels originated from the gossip in the pre-Qin period, which is a record of poor knowledge. After the long-term development of Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, Sui and Tang Dynasties, China's classical novels have made remarkable progress, forming two novel types: notes and legends.
Vernacular novels, on the other hand, originated from the speaker's scripts in the Tang and Song Dynasties, and the stories were based on folk materials, mainly expressing people's life and ideology. However, both classical Chinese novels and vernacular novels have a long history, showing their own different artistic characteristics.