Formulating the novella: genre and the significance of detail

This essay takes as its starting point H.G. Wells’s 1911 essay “The Contemporary Novel”, in which he distinguishes between short and long fiction based on the apparent quantity and relevance of each form’s detail, anticipating Roland Barthes’s (1968) concept of “insignificant notation” as the superfluous detail that creates the ‘reality effect’ of realist novels. Florian Fuchs (2019) follows this line of thought when he defines the novella by its limited world building, arguing that novellas must “begin from our world…because their focus on one episode prevents them from developing a world of their own.” Here, Fuchs suggests that realism is the natural mode for the novella form. In contrast, I suggest that the limited worldbuilding in the novella is precisely what makes it the ideal form for genre fiction including science fiction and the Gothic, genres whose function or purpose requires a scarcity of detail. In making this argument, I will examine three nineteenth-century novellas across genres: Henry James’s Daisy Miller, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, and H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine.