Alberto Manguel on Steven Moore's 'The Novel': Though it is true that the word "novel" did not come into common use in Europe until the 18th century, the thing itself thrived under many other names in the literatures of almost every country. When in the early 16th century the tag "novel" began to be used in English to describe a certain kind of narrative (a short history first and an extended tale afterwards), the split between fiction and reality became so ingrained in the collective psyche that less than two centuries later, in 1726, when Jonathan Swift published "Gulliver's Travels" as a "true account," a certain Irish bishop observed that "the book was full of improbable lies, and for his part he hardly believed a word of it." For the Irish bishop, a book had to be fiction or nonfiction: It could not be both.
