Is a novel 50,000 words?

I remember hearing this from somewhere. To be considered a novel, a book must have at least 50,000 words.

Who is responsible for this definition, and when was it adopted?

  1. Yes.
  1. No idea, but I’m guessing “the book publishing industry as a whole arrived at a consensus as to how big a book constituted a novel”.

  2. No clue, but since the “novel” as such was only invented in 1740, it had to have been since then.

The requirement of the above quote for the story to be “realistic” confuses me. Are sci-fi books not novels? How about fantasy books (Harry Potter-type books included)?

The definition of the novel ( like most definitions in the art-world) is not universally agreed. The simplest is simply une fiction en prose d’une certaine étendue ( “a fiction in prose of a certain extent”)[sup]1[/sup], with 50,000 words marking the rough cut-off point between the short novel and the long novella.
Another trend in criticism is to distinguish prose fictions according to their subject-matter and style. A novel is then a realistic work in the which the primary focus of interest is the moral development of one or more of the major characters. The main trend of the novel is then that containing Defoe, Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, Conrad, Henry James and Lawrence and other similar writers.
To say that a book is not a novel by this definition is not ( necessarily) to dismiss it: none of Animal Farm, Gulliver’s Travels or Frankenstein counts as a novel, but they are all still great books. Other categories include the satire and the fable. Popular or genre novels which portray realistic events but which concentrate on plot rather than character development would probably be described simply as books, stories or fiction ( if they are discussed in works of literary criticism at all.)
As for the first novel, why Pamela? What about Robinson Crusoe (1719) or The Princess de Clèves (1678)?

  1. Abel Chevally, Le Roman Anglais de Notre Temps, quoted in E M forster, Aspects of the Novel

According to the rules of the Nebula Awards (given by the professional association, The Science Fiction Writers of America – as good a temple as any),

a. Short Story: less than 7,500 words.
b. Novelette: at least 7,500 words but less than 17,500 words.
c. Novella: at least 17,500 words but less than 40,000 words.
d. Novel: 40,000 words or more

Just to join the history debate, here have been novel in ancient Rome already.

Regarding the requirement from realism, I believe this is to distinguish the novel from the medieval romance (e.g. Le Morte Darthur by Sir Thomas Malory) rather than from modern fantasy literature.

The extended prose work that is known as the modern novel first became a serious literary form in the early 18th Century, although prose fiction is far older, dating back to classical antiquity. The development of an educated literate middle class in Britain (and other places) around 1700, together with improved printing technology, led to the growth of the novel as a popular form of literature (along with the appearance of magazines and later newspapers). What distinguished the novel from earlier fiction is that 18th century works by people such as Fielding and Richardson are more or less about the lives of people like their readers, rather than tales of myth and legend. Hence the new art form, which was differentiated from medieval prose romance.

But any quoted length requirement is essentially bogus. Probably a novel is anything that can be published alone in book form.

Publishers these days rarely publish novels less than 60,000 words. Short novels look “thin” to book buyers, especially at current prices, so they pass.

There is no requirement that a novel be “realistic” (whatever that means). That’s an utterly false requirement, primarily put forth to ghettoize fiction that seems disreputable to the self-appointed gatekeepers of great literature (no one has ever said that, say, “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” or “Slaughterhouse Five” aren’t a great novels because they’re not “realistic.”).