<Ul> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> </Ul> <P> A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, normally in prose, which is typically published as a book . </P> <P> The genre has been described as having "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years," 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 . </P> <P> Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote (the first part of which was published in 1605), is frequently cited as the first significant European novelist of the modern era . </P>

The novel emerged as a distinct form of literature in europe during the