SOURCE: The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, University of California Press, 1962, pp. 9-59.

Watt's The Rise of the Novel has remained one of the most important critical works on the English novel. In the two chapters reprinted below, Watt claims formal realism as the single most significant ingredient in the novel's rise to precedence as a literary genre.

There are still no wholly satisfactory answers to many of the general questions which anyone interested in the early eighteenth-century novelists and their works is likely to ask: Is the novel a new literary form? And if we assume, as is commonly done, that it is, and that it was begun by Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, how does it differ from the prose fiction of the past, from that of Greece, for example, or that of the Middle Ages, or of seventeenth-century France? And is...