Abstract: This essay argues that the dearth of novella theory in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century US is symptomatic of the form's non-canonicity, its peculiar resistance to institutions of cultural administration. We can appreciate this non-canonicity, the essay insists, by grappling with one stubborn, unavoidable fact that, probably more than any other, has obstructed the novella's theorization—the fact that the term "novella" seems to name at least three forms that bear an uncertain relationship to each other: (1) the "Renaissance" novella; (2) the German "Novelle"; and, most familiar to contemporary American readers, (3) works of prose fiction that are shorter than novels and longer than short stories. In three disjointed entries on these forms, this essay attempts to discover the continuities in the novella's discontinuous history, while leaving open the possibility, nevertheless, that the designation "novella" might not name a coherent object at all.
Morgan Day Frank (Mon,) studied this question.