Allen, Walter. The English Novel: A Short Critical History. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc, 1951, 454.

Devotes a prefatory chapter to considering which pre-eighteenth-century literary forms precipitated the emergence of the novel. The critic focuses primarily on the divergent threads of realism, exemplified by John Bunyan, and romance, exemplified by Aphra Behn, in the development of the novel genre..

Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, 300 p.

Treats the development of the novel—both as concrete literary genre and as cultural force—as inseparable from the social, economic, and political status of women.

Baker, Ernest A. The History of the English Novel, vol. Ill: The Later Romances and the Establishment of Realism. New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1929, 278 p.

The third volume in this series, a very thorough and comprehensive view that tends to present the novel as progressing inevitably from fabulous romance to "a truthful and cogent study of realities."

Brown, Homer Obed. Institutions of the English Novel: From Defoe to Scott. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997, 228 p.

Examines the growth of thought about the novel alongside the growth of the novel itself, emphasizing the strategies that certain advocates used to sanction those novels that first displayed the qualities we now think of as characteristic of the novel.

Crawford, Patricia. "Women's Published Writings 1600-1700." In Women in English Society 1500-1800, edited by Mary Prior, pp. 211-81. London and New York: Methuen, 1985.

Documents works published by women in the seventeenth century. The critic also investigates ways that these authors responded to contemporary prejudices about women, specifically against female assumption of authority.

Hunter, J. Paul. Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990, 421 p.

Explores the forms in which the novel eventually emerged and grew by tracing its roots in British literature—across all genres—and culture. Written to be accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Lovett, Robert Morss and Helen Sard Hughes. The History of the Novel in England. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1932, 495 p.

Devotes several chapters to a broad survery of the novel's beginnings. Lovett and Hughes examine the efforts of many minor and experimental writers, and provide extensive coverage of the major male authors of the eighteenth century.

MacCarthy, B. G. Women Writers: Their Contribution to the English Novel 1621-1744. Oxford: Cork University Press and B.H. Blackwell, 1946, 288 p.

Early and distinctly feminist argument that women contributed substantially to the novel's development. The critic associates women's success as novel-writers with the gradual loosening of social, political, and economic restrictions.

McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, 529 p.

Emphasizes a broad chronological scope and stresses the importance of critical method. The critic pursues a "genre study" of the novel as "an early modern cultural instrument" deployed specifically for social and political purposes.

Perry, Ruth. Women, Letters, and the Novel. New York: AMS Press, 1980, 218p.

Focusing specifically on epistlary fictions—novels presented in the form of letters—delineates the major cultural shifts that facilitated the novel's emergence, especially as these shifts altered women's social status.

Richetti, John J. Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns, 1700-1739. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1969, 274 p.

Examines the dominant forms of prose fiction in the half-century preceeding Samuel Richardson, paying particularattention to the popular, usually romantic forms embraced by the broad reading public.

Tompkins, J.M.S. The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1961, 388 p.

Approaches the novel "rather as a popular amusement than a literary form" in order to study the audience and the market as much as the books and their authors.