Singh, 1 Kshithi Bhanu Singh MA English Semester – I ES418E – English Novel - I Course Instructor: Professor Saugata Bhaduri. November 24, 2011 The Rise of Manga and Manga as an extension of the Novel form. The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines Novel as “an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals imaginatively with human experience, usually through a connected sequence of events involving a group of persons in a specific setting. Within its broad framework, the genre of the novel has encompassed an extensive range of types and styles: picaresque, epistolary, gothic, romantic, realist, historical-to name only some of the important ones.” The Novel as a genre has a history that is easily traceable, going back to Thomas Malory , Le Morte d'Arthur , (written circa 1470 , published 1485 ). The term ‘novel’ refers back to the creation of short stories that remained part of a European oral culture of storytelling into the late 19th century. Fairy tales, jokes, little funny stories designed to make a point in a conversation, the exemplum a priest would insert in a sermon belong into this tradition. Written collections of such stories circulated in a wide range of products from practical compilations of examples designed for the use of clerics to such poetic cycles as Boccaccio 's Decameron (1354) and Geoffrey Chaucer 's Canterbury Tales (1386–1400). The Graphic Novel and its definition on the other hand is debatable and difficult to trace. Roughly speaking one can define a graphic novel as “ a narrative work in which the story is conveyed to the reader using sequential art in either an experimental design