Notte, Gherardo delle See Gerrit van Honthorst
Nottingham Vna-tig-em\ City and unitary authority (pop., 2001: 266,995), geographic and historic county of Nottinghamshire, north- central England. Located on the River Trent, northeast of Birmingham, the original Saxon town was held by the Danes in the 9th century and became part of the Danelaw. It was the scene of three parliaments in the 14th cen¬ tury. In 1642, on Standard Hill, King Charles I raised his standard at the outbreak of the English Civil Wars. Nottingham Castle stands on that site. The link between Nottingham and Robin Hood is commemorated by a statue on Castle Green. The city has a distinctive lace quarter. It is the site of the University of Nottingham.
Nottinghamshire Vna-tiq-em-.shhA Administrative (pop., 2001: 748,503), geographic, and historic county, East Midlands, north-central England. It has coalfields and railway lines in the west, and in its centre it contains a broad belt of infertile sandstone. It is the location of the medieval forest of Sherwood, the haunt of Robin Hood, which stretched
north from the city of Nottingham. Farmland is found in the Vales of Trent and Bel voir, where agriculture includes dairy farming. The chief river is the Trent, along which there are numerous thermal electric power stations. The southwestern part of the county is densely populated and heavily industrialized.
Nouakchott \nu-'ak-,shat\ City (pop., 1999 est.: metro, area, 881,000), capital of Mauritania. It is on a plateau near the Atlantic coast of western African, north-northeast of Dakar, Senegal. It was a small village until Mauritania was granted full independence from France in 1960. Then the city was developed as the capital of the new nation. It was a major refu¬ gee centre during the Saharan droughts of the 1970s and grew rapidly. A port facility was built nearby for the export of petroleum and copper.
Noumea \nu-'ma-9\ formerly Port-de-France \,p6r-d3-'fra n s\ Town (pop., 1996: 76,293), port, and capital of New Caledonia territory. Located on the southwestern coast of New Caledonia Island, it was founded in 1854 as Port-de-France. The city is situated on an excellent deepwater harbour protected by Nou Island and a reef. It has modern buildings, a large public market, and St. Joseph’s Cathedral, an old stone structure.
nouvelle cuisine Xnii-'vel-kwi-'zenX Style in international cuisine developed in France in the 1960s and ’70s that stresses freshness, light¬ ness, and clarity of flavour, as distinct from the richer and more calorie¬ laden classic haute cuisine. Dishes commonly include sauces made of vegetable and fruit purees, novel combinations of foods in small quanti¬ ties, and elegant displays highlighting details of texture and colour.
nova Any of a class of stars whose luminosity temporarily increases by several thousand up to a million times normal. Most appear to be close binary stars, one of which is a white dwarf star drawing in matter from the other until it becomes unstable, causing an outburst in which the outer layer of material is shed. A nova reaches maximum luminosity within hours after its outburst and may shine intensely for several days or even a few weeks; it then slowly returns to its former level. The process can repeat at intervals ranging from a few dozen to hundreds of thousands of years. Stars that become novas are usually too faint to see with the unaided eye until their sudden increase in luminosity, sometimes great enough to make them readily visible in the night sky. To observers, such objects may appeal* to be new stars; hence their name (Latin for “new”). See also SUPERNOVA.
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).