| 释义 |
novelette|nɒvəˈlɛt|
Also novellette.
[f. novel n. 3 b + -ette; or ad. It. novelletta.]
1. A story of moderate length having the characteristics of a novel. Now freq. applied to a short romantic or sentimental novel of inferior quality.
1814J. C. Dunlop Hist. Fiction II. vii. 127 The endless variety of tales, or Novelettes,..which form so popular and so extensive a branch of Italian literature. 1820Moore Mem. (1853) III. 180 He has nearly finished a little novelette, a story, since he has been in Paris. 1847H. Miller First Impr. Eng. xiii. (1857) 221 The novelette and poem for the young lady, and the tale for the child. 1873Ruskin Fors Clav. xxx. 2 Among them were also many tiny novelettes. 1914G. B. Shaw Misalliance 66 ‘You want to be the hero of a romance and to get into the papers... A son revenges his mother's shame. Villain weltering in his gore...’ The Man ‘Oh, rot! do you think I read novelettes?’ 1919W. S. Maugham Moon & Sixpence xix. 161 If I am rhetorical it is because Stroeve was rhetorical. (Do we not know that man in moments of emotion expresses himself naturally in the terms of a novelette?) 1962Woman's Own 3 Nov. 14/3 A ghost-lover..is a mixture of novelettes, and film stars, and pop singers, and a girl's inner yearnings as to what she thinks she wants in a man. 1965R. Paulson Novelette before 1900 p. v, Novelette..designates a distinctive, yet certainly vague, genre; a narrative in prose that is longer than a short story and shorter than a novel. .. It lacks the diffuseness as well as the length of a novel, and it covers more ground as well as more space than its modern offspring, the short story. 1967A. Burgess Novel Now i. 16 We're unwilling to dignify books of, say, fifty thousand words and under with the title of novel, preferring to use the Italian term novella (‘novelette’ disparages not only length but content).
2. Music (see quot. 1893).
1893tr. Riemann's Dict. Mus., Novelette, a term probably first used by Schumann for pianoforte pieces of free form and containing a considerable number of themes. 1894Times 24 Nov. 7/2 She played as her solos Schumann's novelette in E major [etc.].
Hence noveˈlettist, a writer of novelettes; also noveˈletter.
1883D. C. Murray Hearts III. xxxii. 210 Novelists and novelettists, poets and poetasters, are thick about her. 1898G. B. Shaw Our Theatres in Nineties (1932) III. 327 Mr Ogilvie is no mere twaddling novelettist. 1904Beerbohm Around Theatres (1953) 313 The plot of it was just that which even our worst novelettists have out⁓grown. 1955Times 28 July 3/5 She was the novelettist of the repressions of a vanished social world. |