Types of Novels: A Comprehensive Classification
Types of Novels
1. Bucolic or Pastoral Novels
Written in a tone of simplicity and inspired caste, these novels idealize characters and their environment. They describe the loves of shepherds living in a benign and gentle natural setting.
2. Byzantine Novels
Characterized by the accumulation of implausible adventures and episodes, including travel, shipwrecks, findings, and disappearances.
3. Picaresque Novels
These novels tell the colorful life stories of thieves, thugs, gamblers, and vagabonds—in a word, rogues. In them, the mischievous protagonist, narrating their own life, takes revenge on the powerful who have abused and neglected them, exposing their faults and weaknesses. These novels are often autobiographical and satirical.
4. Adventure Novels
Characterized by extensive narratives whose protagonist is a character who professes the chivalric ideal—that is, they devote their life to defending justice and the weak and helpless.
5. Gothic Novels
These novels are characterized by romantic and ecclesiastical architecture, such as ruins, churches, and monasteries. They belong to a type of mystery and terror story, whose plot is set in an old Gothic castle where strange and disturbing events happen. Essential elements of this novel include the plight of the protagonist (a young woman at serious risk), love, and an atmosphere of mystery, enhanced by the intervention of fantastic or creepy creatures that cause anxiety and terror.
6. Historical Novels
Historical novels are about real arguments or issues that occurred in the past with respect to the time of writing. It is said that the best history of Rome is found in the novel Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz.
7. Police Novels
This is a kind of narrative that tells the story of a crime whose author is unknown. Through a rational procedure based on observation and inquiry (conducted usually by a detective), the culprit or culprits are discovered.
8. Observation Novels
Under this name are grouped a number of types of novels characterized by the analysis or observation of various aspects of human life.
9. Sentimental Novels
Romantic novels exalt nature, love, ingenuity, passion, and melancholy.
10. Realist and Naturalist Novels
Realists abandon the fantastic and extraordinary elements of the Romantics and try to base their stories on reality, with everyday events set in locations that the writer knows well.
11. Biographical Novels
This is a form of the new literature that revolutionized the technique of historical biography. It takes great men or heroes as ordinary beings and follows them from the cradle to the summit of glory and then to the grave.
12. Thesis Novels
These novels present conflicts or problems of a religious, political, social, or other order. The thesis novel is dominated by the idea of action, and there is usually a didactic and even controversial purpose: the author fights for their ideas and moves their characters to reach preconceived results.
13. Current Novels
These are novels with a problem. Many of these portray men as disgusting monsters, vulgar, tormented slaves, helpless victims, careerist dealers, liars, and libertines. The search for the meaning of life is a problem for the character. Man, a victim of the administration in the world, threatened by the atom and economic crises, and thrown into the machinery of a world almost totally disrupted and technical, is becoming more inside without a country. The common man today can no longer be a man or a harmonic ideal hero. He does not even have the strength for a great passion.