Britannica Concise 2005

Nova Scotia \ l no-v9- , sko-sh3\ Province (pop., 2001: 943,000), Canada, one of the Maritime Provinces. It comprises the peninsula of Nova Scotia, Cape Breton Island, and a few small adjacent islands, and it is bounded by the Northumberland Strait, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the Atlantic Ocean, the Bay of Fundy, and New Brunswick. Its capital is Halifax. The region was first visited by Vikings c. ad 1000 and was inhabited by Mic- mac Indians when John Cabot claimed it for England in 1497. French set¬ tlers in 1605 adopted the Micmac name Acadia for the region. English and Scottish colonists arrived by 1621. The conflict between France and England over control of the area was ended by the 1713 Peace of Utrecht, which awarded it to England. In the 1750s, the British expelled most of the French settlers. Following the American Revolution, many loyalists emigrated there. It joined the Dominion of Canada in 1867 as one of the original members. The province’s economic mainstays are fishing, shipbuilding, and transatlantic ship¬ ping.

Novalis \no-’va-lis\ orig. Fried¬ rich Leopold, Baron von Hardenberg (b. May 2, 1772,

Oberwiederstedt, Prussian Saxo¬ ny—d. March 25, 1801, Weissenfels,

Saxony) German Romantic poet and theorist. Born into a noble family, he took his pseudonym from a former family name. He studied law and then mining and in 1799 became a mine inspector. His beautiful Hymns to the Night (1800) expresses his grief on the death of his young fian¬ cee. In his last years before his own death from tuberculosis at age 28, he drafted a philosophical system based on idealism and produced his most

Novalis, detail of an engraving by Edouard Eichens, 1845

COURTESY OF THE STAATLICHE MUSEEN ZU BERLIN, GERMANY; PHOTOGRAPH, WALTER STEINKOPF

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significant poetic work. His mythical romance Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802) describes a young poet’s mystical and romantic searchings.

Novara Xno-'va-raV Battle of (March 23, 1849) Battle of the first Ital¬ ian war of independence at Novara, Italy, near Milan. Austrian troops under Joseph Radetzky defeated a larger Italian force under Charles Albert, king of Sardinia-Piedmont. The defeat revealed Piedmont’s lack of sup¬ port from the smaller Italian states and led to the abdication of Charles Albert.

Novartis AG Swiss pharmaceutical company. It was formed through the 1996 merger of two Swiss firms: Ciba (see Ciba-Geigy) and Sandoz, a chemical company with interests in pharmaceuticals, nutrition, and agri¬ culture. Novartis’s products include generic drugs, eye-care products, consumer health-care products, and pharmaceuticals. In 2002 the com¬ pany created an ethics committee to evaluate research involving human stem cells.

novel Fictional prose narrative of considerable length and some com¬ plexity that deals imaginatively with human experience through a con¬ nected sequence of events involving a group of persons in a specific setting. The genre encompasses a wide range of types and styles, includ¬ ing picaresque, epistolary, gothic, romantic, realist, and historical novels. Though forerunners of the novel appeared in a number of places, includ¬ ing Classical Rome and 11th-century Japan, the European novel is usu¬ ally said to have begun with Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The novel was established as a literary form in England in the 18th century through the work of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding. The typi¬ cal elements of a conventional novel are plot, character, setting, narrative method and point of view, scope, and myth or symbolism. These elements have been subject to experimentation since the earliest appearance of the novel. Compare antinovel. See also novella; short story.

novella Story with a compact and pointed plot, often realistic and satiric in tone. Originating in Italy during the Middle Ages, it was often based on local events; individual tales often were gathered into collections. The novella developed into a psychologically subtle and structured short tale, with writers frequently using a frame story to unify tales around a theme, as in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. The term is also used to describe a work of fiction intermediate in length—and sometimes complexity— between a short story and a novel. Examples of novellas include Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground (1864), Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912), and Henry James’s The Aspern Papers (1888).

Noverre \no-'ver\, Jean-Georges (b. April 29, 1727, Paris, Fr.—d. Oct. 19, 1810, Saint-Germain-en-Laye) French dancer and choreographer. His treatise Letters on Dancing and Ballets (1760) stressed the need for unified dramatic structure by integrating story, music, choreography, and set design, as opposed to the loosely connected episodes of the dance suite that then prevailed. This innovative approach—called ballet d’action, or “ballet with a story”—brought major reforms in ballet production. His invention of ballet d’action was challenged by Gasparo Angiouni, who had developed a simpler approach to the new form. In 1776 Noverre became ballet master of the Paris Opera.