My Science School

Charlotte's Web is a book of children's literature by American author E. B. White and illustrated by Garth Williams; it was published on October 15, 1952, by Harper & Brothers. The novel tells the story of a livestock pig named Wilbur and his friendship with a barn spider named Charlotte. When Wilbur is in danger of being slaughtered by the farmer, Charlotte writes messages praising Wilbur (such as "Some Pig") in her web in order to persuade the farmer to let him live.

Charlotte's Web was adapted into an animated feature by Hanna-Barbera Productions and Sagittarius Productions in 1973. Paramount released a direct-to-video sequel, Charlotte's Web 2: Wilbur's Great Adventure, in the U.S. in 2003 (Universal released the film internationally). A live-action film version of E. B. White's original story was released in 2006. A video game based on this adaptation was also released in 2006.

Did you know that there really was a spider named 'Charlotte' who inspired E.B. White to write the story? He bought a farm in Maine, where he lived for many years and raised all kinds of animals. The spider lived in his barn and he used to spend hours just watching her, the way that Fern watched the animals in Charlotte's Web. Wilbur, the pig, was also inspired by a pig that E.B. White was raising on his farm. The barn in which Avery and Fern swing on the rope swing is also real and is still standing—and the rope swing is still there! E.B. White wrote Charlotte's Web because he loved animals and enjoyed life on his farm.

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A Wrinkle in Time, novel for young adults by Madeleine L’Engle, published in 1962. It won a Newbery Medal in 1963. Combining theology, fantasy, and science, it is the story of travel through space and time to battle a cosmic evil. With their neighbour Calvin O’Keefe, young Meg Murry and her brother Charles Wallace embark on a cosmic journey to find their lost father, a scientist studying time travel. Assisted by three eccentric women—Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which—the children travel to the planet Camazotz, where they encounter a repressed society controlled by IT, a disembodied brain that represents evil. Among the themes of the work are the dangers of unthinking conformity and scientific irresponsibility and the saving power of love. 

Upon completion in 1960, the novel was rejected by at least 26 publishers, because it was, in L'Engle's words, "too different," and "because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was really difficult for children, and was it a children's or an adults' book, anyhow?"

In "A Special Message from Madeleine L'Engle" on the Random House website, L'Engle offers another possible reason for the rejections: "A Wrinkle in Time had a female protagonist in a science fiction book," which at the time was uncommon. After trying "forty-odd" publishers (L'Engle later said "twenty-six rejections"), L'Engle's agent returned the manuscript to her. Then at Christmas, L'Engle threw a tea party for her mother. One of the guests happened to know John C. Farrar of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and he insisted that L'Engle should meet with him. Although the publisher did not, at the time, publish a line of children's books, Farrar met L'Engle, liked the novel, and ultimately published it under the Ariel imprint.

The book was reissued by Square Fish in trade and mass market paperback formats in May 2007, along with the rest of the Time Quintet. This new edition includes a previously unpublished interview with L'Engle as well as a transcription of her Newbery Medal acceptance speech.

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The Hobbit, or There and Back Again is a children's fantasy novel by English author J. R. R. Tolkien. It was published on 21 September 1937 to wide critical acclaim, being nominated for the Carnegie Medal and awarded a prize from the New York Herald Tribune for best juvenile fiction. The book remains popular and is recognized as a classic in children's literature.

The story is told in the form of an episodic quest, and most chapters introduce a specific creature or type of creature of Tolkien's geography. Bilbo gains a new level of maturity, competence, and wisdom by accepting the disreputable, romantic, fey, and adventurous sides of his nature and applying his wits and common sense. The story reaches its climax in the Battle of Five Armies, where many of the characters and creatures from earlier chapters re-emerge to engage in conflict.

The publisher was encouraged by the book's critical and financial success and, therefore, requested a sequel. As Tolkien's work progressed on its successor, The Lord of the Rings, he made retrospective accommodations for it in The Hobbit. These few but significant changes were integrated into the second edition. Further editions followed with minor emendations, including those reflecting Tolkien's changing concept of the world into which Bilbo stumbled.

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If you love books, then you know the feeling of walking into a bookstore or a library and getting overwhelmed by the rows upon rows of books on display. They are classified by genre, authors, subjects, and languages. But did you know that works of fiction are further categorised by their word count?

A novel is the most commonly known form of a book. But have you heard of novellas and novelettes? And how do the three differ from one another? Read on to find out..

Size matters

We often say that we are reading a novel, but not all books are novels. A book is considered to be a novel only if it is more than 50,000 words (sometimes books up to 40,000 words are referred to as short novels). Works of fiction having less than the stipulated word count are classified as novelettes and novellas.

Caught in the middle

A novella is the longest form of short fiction - between 20.000 and 49.999 words. It lies somewhere between a novel and a short story. "Of Mice and Men" by John Steinbeck and "Animal Farm" by George Orwell are classic examples of novellas.

On the other hand, novelettes are generally books with a word count between 7.500 and 19.999 words. That means they are just a bit longer than a short story and micro or flash fiction, which is usually under 1,000 words.

At just over 9,200 words, Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Spectacles" is a classic example of a novelette. It is a story of a man who doesn't wear his spectacles and ends up marrying his grandmother

Besides word count and page length, another major difference between the three forms of books is the subject matter.

Because of their short length, novelettes and novellas are usually fast-paced and less complicated than novels. They follow a single central conflict and do not delve much into backstories or other points of view. Arguably, both novellas and novelettes are similar to short stories, but are wider in scope.

And the story goes on...

The aforementioned differences between novels, novellas and novelettes are not set in stone. There is still a lack of consensus in the literary world over the exact definitions of these forms. The definitions and stipulated word count can vary from publisher to publisher and country to country. To make matters even more confusing, some literature experts say that whether a book is a novel or a novella should be judged on the basis of their content and narrative structure, and not on their length alone.

So is the book you're reading a novel or not? Well, the jury is still out!

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

• "Harry Potter series: With each of the seven books consisting of more than 70,000 words, J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter series is universally acknowledged as a novel series. J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" and "The Hobbit" books too are considered novels. However, both Tolkien and Rowling have written companion books such as "The Silmarillion" and “The Tales of Beedle the Bard” respectively which may be considered novellas.


• "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde": Just like the multiple personalities of its protagonist, Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde too has two sides. Although the 16, 740 words book is widely considered to be a novella, some literati refer to it as a novelette.


• "The Little Prince": At less than 100 pages (16, 534 words), Antoine de Saint-Exupery's "The Little Prince" is far too short to be considered a novel and far too long to be a short story. So it falls in the category of a novella.


• "The Call of the Cthulhu": Many of the short works by H.P. Lovecraft are so short, ranging from 3,000 to 5,000 words, that they do not qualify to be even novelettes. Only his most famous work "The Call of the Cthulhu" falls under the category of a novelette because it is 11, 905 words.

 

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Doctor Zhivago is a novel by Boris Pasternak, first published in 1957 in Italy. The novel is named after its protagonist, Yuri Zhivago, a physician and poet, and takes place between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and World War II.

The novel was made into a film by David Lean in 1965, and since then has twice been adapted for television, most recently as a miniseries for Russian TV in 2006. The novel Doctor Zhivago has been part of the Russian school curriculum since 2003, where it is read in 11th grade.

Dr. Yury Zhivago, Pasternak’s alter ego, is a poet, philosopher, and physician whose life is disrupted by the war and by his love for Lara, the wife of a revolutionary. His artistic nature makes him vulnerable to the brutality and harshness of the Bolsheviks; wandering throughout Russia, he is unable to take control of his fate, and dies in utter poverty. The poems he leaves behind constitute some of the most beautiful writing in the novel.

 

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Invisible Man, novel by Ralph Ellison, published in 1952. Invisible Man won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1953. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Invisible Man 19th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005, calling it "the quintessential American picaresque of the 20th century," rather than a "race novel, or even a bildungsroman." Malcolm Bradbury and Richard Ruland recognize an existential vision with a "Kafka-like absurdity." According to The New York Times, Barack Obama modeled his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father on Ellison's novel.

Published in 1952, Invisible Man explores the theme of a person's search for their identity and place in society, as seen from the perspective of the first-person narrator, an unnamed African American man, first in the Deep South and then in the New York City of the 1930s. In contrast to his contemporaries such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Ellison created characters that are dispassionate, educated, articulate, and self-aware. Through the protagonist, Ellison explores the contrasts between the Northern and Southern varieties of racism and their alienating effect. The narrator is "invisible" in a figurative sense, in that "people refuse to see" him, and also experiences a kind of dissociation. The novel also contains taboo issues such as incest and the controversial subject of communism.

In 1975, Ellison was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his hometown of Oklahoma City honored him with the dedication of the Ralph Waldo Ellison Library. Continuing to teach, Ellison published mostly essays, and in 1984, he received the New York City College's Langston Hughes Medal. In 1985, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. In 1986, his Going to the Territory was published; this is a collection of seventeen essays that included insight into southern novelist William Faulkner and Ellison's friend Richard Wright, as well as the music of Duke Ellington and the contributions of African Americans to America's national identity.

In 1992, Ellison was awarded a special achievement award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards; his artistic achievements included work as a sculptor, musician, photographer, and college professor as well as his writing output. He taught at Bard College, Rutgers University, the University of Chicago, and New York University. Ellison was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

 

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In the final decade of his life, Wilde wrote and published nearly all of his major work. In his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (published in Lippincott’s Magazine, 1890, and in book form, revised and expanded by six chapters, 1891), Wilde combined the supernatural elements of the Gothic novel with the unspeakable sins of French decadent fiction. 

Though the novel is now revered as a great and classic work, at the time critics were outraged by the book's apparent lack of morality. Wilde vehemently defended himself in a preface to the novel, considered one of the great testaments to aestheticism, in which he wrote, "an ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style" and "vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art."

Wilde's first play, Lady Windermere's Fan, opened in February 1892 to widespread popularity and critical acclaim, encouraging Wilde to adopt playwriting as his primary literary form. Over the next few years, Wilde produced several great plays—witty, highly satirical comedies of manners that nevertheless contained dark and serious undertones. His most notable plays were A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), his most famous play.

 

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The Bell Jar is the only novel written by the American writer and poet Sylvia Plath. Originally published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" in 1963, the novel is semi-autobiographical with the names of places and people changed. The book is often regarded as a roman à clef because the protagonist's descent into mental illness parallels Plath's own experiences with what may have been clinical depression or bipolar II disorder. Plath died by suicide a month after its first United Kingdom publication. The novel was published under Plath's name for the first time in 1967 and was not published in the United States until 1971, in accordance with the wishes of both Plath's husband, Ted Hughes, and her mother. The novel has been translated into nearly a dozen languages.

Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts. Plath was a gifted and troubled poet, known for the confessional style of her work. Her interest in writing emerged at an early age, and she started out by keeping a journal. After publishing a number of works, Plath won a scholarship to Smith College in 1950.

While she was a student, Plath spent time in New York City during the summer of 1953 working for Mademoiselle magazine as a guest editor. Soon after, Plath tried to kill herself by taking sleeping pills. She eventually recovered, having received treatment during a stay in a mental health facility. Plath returned to Smith and finished her degree in 1955.

After Hughes left her for another woman in 1962, Plath fell into a deep depression. Struggling with her mental illness, she wrote The Bell Jar (1963), her only novel, which was based on her life and deals with one young woman's mental breakdown. Plath published the novel under the pseudonym, Victoria Lucas. She also created the poems that would make up the collection Ariel (1965), which was released after her death. Plath committed suicide on February 11, 1963.

 

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Arundhati Roy, full name Suzanna Arundhati Roy, Indian author, actress, and political activist who was best known for the award-winning novel The God of Small Things (1997) and for her involvement in environmental and human rights causes.

In 1997 Roy published her debut novel, The God of Small Things to wide acclaim. The semiautobiographical work departed from the conventional plots and light prose that had been typical among best-sellers. Composed in a lyrical language about South Asian themes and characters in a narrative that wandered through time, Roy’s novel became the biggest-selling book by a nonexpatriate Indian author and won the 1998 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

Roy’s subsequent literary output largely consisted of politically oriented nonfiction, much of it aimed at addressing the problems faced by her homeland in the age of global capitalism. Among her publications were Power Politics (2001), The Algebra of Infinite Justice (2002), War Talk (2003), Public Power in the Age of Empire (2004), Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers (2009), Broken Republic: Three Essays (2011), and Capitalism: A Ghost Story (2014). In 2017 Roy published The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, her first novel in 20 years. The work blends personal stories with topical issues as it uses a large cast of characters, including a transgender woman and a resistance fighter in Kashmir, to explore contemporary India.

 

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Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was an American novelist and journalist. Mitchell wrote only one novel, published during her lifetime, the American Civil War-era novel Gone with the Wind, for which she won the National Book Award for Most Distinguished Novel of 1936.

The same year she was married, Mitchell landed a job with the Atlanta Journal Sunday magazine, where she ended up writing nearly 130 articles. Mitchell would get married a second time during this period, wedding John Robert Marsh in 1925. As seemed to be the case in Mitchell’s life, though, yet another good thing was to come to an end too quickly, as her journalist career ended in 1926 due to complications from a broken ankle.

With her broken ankle keeping Mitchell off her feet, in 1926 she began writing Gone With the Wind. Perched at an old sewing table, and writing the last chapter first and the other chapters randomly, she finished most of the book by 1929. A novel about the Civil War and Reconstruction, Gone With the Wind is told from a Southern point of view, informed by Mitchell’s family and steeped in the history of the South and the tragedy of the war.

In July 1935, New York publisher Macmillan offered her a $500 advance and 10 percent royalty payments. Mitchell set to finalizing the manuscript, changing characters' names (Scarlett was Pansy in earlier drafts), cutting and rearranging chapters and finally naming the book Gone With the Wind, a phrase from “Cynara!, a favorite Ernest Dowson poem. Gone With the Wind was published in 1936 to huge success and took home the 1937 Pulitzer. Mitchell became an overnight celebrity, and the landmark film based on her novel came out just three years later and went on to become a classic, winning eight Oscars and two special Oscars.

 

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Emily Brontë, in full Emily Jane Brontë, pseudonym Ellis Bell, English novelist and poet who produced but one novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), a highly imaginative work of passion and hate set on the Yorkshire moors. Emily was perhaps the greatest of the three Brontë sisters, but the record of her life is extremely meagre, for she was silent and reserved and left no correspondence of interest, and her single novel darkens rather than solves the mystery of her spiritual existence.

Some of Emily's earliest known works involve a fictional world called Gondal, which she created with her sister Anne. She wrote both prose and poems about this imaginary place and its inhabitants. Emily also wrote other poems as well. Her sister Charlotte discovered some of Emily's poems and sought to publish them along with her own work and some by Anne. The three sisters used male pen names for their collection—Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Published in 1846, the book only sold a few copies and garnered little attention.

Again publishing as Ellis Bell, Brontë published her defining work, Wuthering Heights, in December 1847. The complex novel explores two families—the Earnshaws and the Lintons—across two generations and their stately homes, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. Heathcliff, an orphan taken in by the Earnshaws, is the driving force between the action in the book. He first motivated by his love for his Catherine Earnshaw, then by his desire for revenge against her for what he believed to be rejection.

 

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To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by the American author Harper Lee. It was published in 1960 and was instantly successful. In the United States, it is widely read in high schools and middle schools. To Kill a Mockingbird has become a classic of modern American literature, winning the Pulitzer Prize. The plot and characters are loosely based on Lee's observations of her family, her neighbors and an event that occurred near her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, in 1936, when she was ten.

One character from the novel, Charles Baker (“Dill”) Harris, is based on Truman Capote, Lee’s childhood friend and next-door neighbour in Monroeville, Alabama. After the phenomenal success that followed the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, some suspected that Capote was the actual author of Lee’s work, a rumour put to rest when, in 2006, a 1959 letter from Capote to his aunt was found, stating that he had read and liked the draft of To Kill a Mockingbird that Lee had shown him but making no mention of any role in writing it.

The novel inspired numerous adaptations, the most notable of which was the classic 1962 film starring Gregory Peck as Atticus. His Academy Award-winning performance became an enduring part of cinema history. Other adaptations included a Broadway play that was adapted by Aaron Sorkin and debuted in 2018.

 

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From “Harry Potter” to “Jane Eyre”, you may have read a variety of coming of age novels fall under the bildungsroman (pronounced bil-duhngz-row-muhn) genre?

The bildungsroman explores the complex and sometimes painful transition from childhood to adulthood – a subject that has continued to fascinate authors and filmmakers for centuries together.

The bildungsroman is a literary genre, which originated in Germany. The term is a combination of bildung, meaning education and roman, the novel. Stories in this genre are focussed on the coming-of-age of the protagonist. It follows the main the protagonist. It follows the main character right from childhood all the way to adulthood. It depicts the manner in which the character grows psychologically and morally.

Examples

Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield” is one of the classic examples of the bildungsroman. The novel narrates the journey of a young man saddled with misfortunes and his rise to fame as an accomplished author.

Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird” is another example as it traces Scout’s awakening to racism.

Origins

The genre gained popularity in the 19th Century with the publication of Goethe's "Wilhelm Meisters Apprenticeship." The bildungsroman usually ends on a positive note, or with a twinge of nostalgia and resignation. In contrast, most of the 20th Century bildungsromane conclude with the death of the character.

There are three sub-genres of the bildungsroman - the Kunstlerroman. which is a novel dealing with the formative years of an artist ("A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"); the Erziehungsroman, a novel of education (the "Harry Potter" series) and the Entwicklungsroman, a novel of development ("Watership Down")

 

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Adapting "Pride and Prejudice" in a manner true to the characters and their interactions is most difficult. Most modern authors almost never get right. "Enthusiasm", however, stands apart. Julie and Ashleigh are best friends. Ashleigh is easily obsessed, with things for a period, of time and during those periods; Julie does what all best friends do—she flows with it. Ashleigh’s latest obsession is Jane Austen. As a true Enthusiast, Ashleigh must now meet Darcy at every cost. So, along with her best friend, she crashes the dance at a Local all-boys school in the hope of meeting Darcy. And, they do. Both girls, who think of themselves as Elizabeth Bennet, fall for the some Darcy.

What could have been a sleep-inducing Love triangle is saved by the author who compels her characters to introspect and discover themselves, each other, their relationship with their parents and their future.

 

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This book is an excellent exploration of the world that Jane Austen, inhabited. Its author Veronica Bennett captures not only the language and manners of the time but also the hardships. it was difficult to be a young, economically weak woman in England in Austen's time. And it was particularly suffocating to be an intellectual who did not enjoy balls, gatherings, dances and marriage. Beginning with, a prologue set in Paris, the book is a fictionalised biography of how Jenny, the central character—intelligent and full of questions - becomes Jane Austen, the author of masterpieces suck as "Emma" and, "Pride and Prejudice". The story focuses on her early life, growing up with her sister Cassandra in a large family in southern England. It explores the experiences that could have formed the plots and characters of her timeless novels.

 

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