Although early prose fiction prototypes of the novel had been popular with readers since the late seventeenth century, the English novel as such only became a mature and predominant literary form in the mid-eighteenth century. After decades of embattled popularity—embattled because the gaurdians of aesthetic value saw these works of fictions as a frivolous and corrupting upstart too derivative of French romance—the novel finally won a respectable place in the literary eschelons in the 1740s, due largely to the works of two writers: Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. Daniel Defoe's Advenstures of Robinson Crusoe, first published in 1719, was the only earlier prose fiction to earn similar favor. The change in opinion, as well as the last step in the novel's rise to sovereignty, has been attributed to the growing presence of realism as the novel's defining formal characteristic.

Before the eighteenth century, prose fiction was a...