Novel

It is almost impossible to talk about the history of the novel without starting with a definition of it, which is by no means easy to do. We all know what we ourselves mean by a novel and have our favorite novelists, whether they are from the heyday of Victorian fiction - Dickens, say, or George Eliot - or someone more modern or postmodern, for example, B. S. Johnson, who is famed for writing a novel that was bought in a box, with loose pages that you could read in any order. Again, you might be a fan of crime or detective fiction, which brings the added complication of the genre. That is, does the fact that a work of fiction is comedy, tragedy, satire, ghost story, and so on affect our definition? Anyway, as far as the history of the English novel is concerned, we're on fairly solid ground when we date the first novels to the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The first that is still read as a novel in the way we read novels now is Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, which did have an enormous effect on English prose writing, but for me, it would be Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Now, people have tried to locate the beginnings even earlier than this, to Elizabethan prose writing and even further back, but I think this is to lose sight of what a novel is and does, and confuses any kind of fiction with the true novel.