Encyclopedia > List of novels whose action takes place within 24 hours
While in drama the Unity of Time prescribes that the action of a play is to take place during a single day, the novel as a rule covers a much longer period of time. There are, however, some notable examples where the time narrated is only one day. The most prominent example is James Joyce's Ulysses, a novel which in one way or another has influenced the genesis of other novels whose action takes place within 24 hours. This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... ... A novel (from French nouvelle Italian novella, new) is an extended, generally fictional narrative in prose. ...
A special category can be established for novels told in retrospect (Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Graves's Claudius novels, for instance), though such an exercise eventually comes to include so many first-person novels as to become too cumbersome to be of much use. Joseph Conrad. ... Heart of Darkness is a novella by Joseph Conrad. ... Portrait of Robert Graves (circa 1974) by Rab Shiell Robert von Ranke Graves (24 July 1895 â 7 December 1985) was an English scholar, poet, and novelist. ... I, Claudius is a novel by Robert Graves, (ISBN 067972477X) first published in 1934, dealing sympathetically with the life of the Roman Emperor Claudius and the history of the Julio-Claudian Dynasty and Roman Empire, from Julius Caesars assassination in 44 BC to Caligulas assassination in 41 AD...
The English word "novel" derives from the Italian word novella, meaning "a tale, a piece of news." The Novel is longer (at least 40,000 words) and more complex than either the short story or the novella, and is not bound by the structural and metrical restrictions of plays or poetry.
The Novel genre sometimes is contrasted with the Romance genrethe original concept is similar, hence, the French and German word for "novel" is "roman".
The 18th century is considered, by most scholars of the English novel, to have been the century of the novel's invention or rise, a phrase popularised in Ian Watt's pioneer study in literary sociology, The Rise of the Novel (1957).