In this influential study, Ian Watt traces the genesis and development of the most popular of all literary forms, the novel. In his penetrating and original readings of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, he investigates the reasons why the three main eighteenth-century novelist wrote in the way they did - a way resulting ultimately in the modern novel of the present day. The rise of the middle classes and of economic individualism, the philosophical innovations of the seventeenth century, complex changes in the social position of women: these are some of the factors underlying an age which produced the authors of Robinson Crusoe, Pamela and Tom Jones.