Talk:Novella

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Contents 1 Remove reference to Spanish TV's novelas? 2 novellas?? 3 "Autobiographical Novella" 4 Quotes or italics

[edit] Remove reference to Spanish TV's novelas?

Are novelas, or telenovelas relevant enough to be included in this article? The spelling of the word novella is not even the same as the spelling of novela, which was previously spelled incorrectly as novella (which I fixed in the article). --SaulPerdomo 21:29, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

-Neither the emo song nor the Spanish television format are relevant to the article. I've removed them.

[edit] novellas??

The article says derives from the Italian word "novella" (plural: "novelle" or "novellas"). What is it referring to?? In Italian the only plural form is novelle. If novellas indicates the English plural, it should be distinguished from talking about Italian.

193.226.250.74 15:34, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Autobiographical Novella"

I have deleted the section on the "Autobiographical Novella," which is not a term of art in wide usage; some novellas may be autobiographical (such as Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It) but the definition contained in the article--that it "is a work that is part fictional novel, part autobiography, with the distinction between the two left to the reader"--was ridiculous. James Frey's book A Million Little Pieces is not an "autobiographical novella," it is a false memoir, or, at best, a semi-autobiographical novel. Same for Wilkomirski's Fragments. There is no such literary form as the "autobiographical novella"--a novella can be autobiographical, just as a novel can. But it is not a distinct genre with its own rules, as the prior definition implied. -- Liatjamie 4/22/06

[edit] Quotes or italics

I know this isn't officially the place to discuss this, but I couldn't find the part of the WP:MOS where this is supposedly codified: that WP style is to italicize the titles of novellas. I wonder if that it something we might want to rethink.

First off, I think it's clear that italicizing or putting quotes around a title is not a way of showing respect or disrespect to some art forms. It's not because we believe feature films are superior to sonnets that we italicize one and not the other. So don't think I'm trying to insult the novella by thinking that quote marks would be more helpful than italics.

The reason I think it would be helpful is that the determination is generally made by whether the art form is generally part of another form. Like, songs are in quotes and albums are in italics. This is useful, because it allows you to distinguish between art works and collections that have the same name (e.g., "Let It Be" and Let It Be').

Novellas, of course, are generally packaged together with one or more other novellas, and/or with short stories. Sometimes the collection has the same name as the novella--e.g., At the Mountains of Madness is a collection that includes At the Mountains of Madness.

Wouldn't it be preferable to avoid this problem by putting novellas in quotation marks? Nareek 05:18, 27 August 2006 (UTC)