Fanshawe (novel)

Fanshawe is a novel written by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. It was his first published work, which he published anonymously in 1828.

Background

Hawthorne was working on a novel as early as his period as an undergraduate at Bowdoin College. Fanshawe, his first published novel, may or may not have been that book.Fanshawe: A Tale appeared anonymously in October 1828 from the Boston publishers Marsh and Capen. Its printing was paid for at the author's own expense, costing him $100. The book was based on Hawthorne's experiences as a Bowdoin College student in the early 1820s.

Fanshawe generally received positive reviews. Sarah Josepha Hale, then editor of the Ladies' Magazine, advised potential readers buy the book rather than rely on finding it at a circulating library. As she wrote, "Purchase it, reader. There is but one volume, and trust me that it is worth placing in your library."William Leggett saw further potential in the young author: "The mind that produced this little, interesting volume, is capable of making great and rich additions to our native literature."

Novel

A novel is a long narrative, normally in prose, which describes fictional characters and events, usually in the form of a sequential story.

The genre has also been described as possessing "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years". This view sees the novel's origins in Classical Greece and Rome, medieval, early modern romance, and the tradition of the novella. The latter, an Italian word used to describe short stories, supplied the present generic English term in the 18th century. Ian Watt, however, in The Rise of the Novel (1957) suggests that the novel first came into being in the early 18th century,

Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, is frequently cited as the first significant European novelist of the modern era; the first part of Don Quixote was published in 1605.

The romance is a closely related long prose narrative. Walter Scott defined it as "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents", whereas in the novel "the events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human events and the modern state of society". However, many romances, including the historical romances of Scott,Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, are also frequently called novels, and Scott describes romance as a "kindred term". Romance, as defined here, should not be confused with the genre fiction love romance or romance novel. Other European languages do not distinguish between romance and novel: "a novel is le roman, der Roman, il romanzo."