Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley: U of California P, 1957.
"To some extent, he echoed Weber [Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Rise of Capitalism (1904-5)] and Tawney [Richard H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1947)] and identified . . . individualism with the `middle classes,' but his use of that notoriously loose designation has been exaggerated by his critics. Most of the time, he employs the term only to label certain values and habits that deserve the tag. He never claims, as some critics assert, that the `middle classes' constituted a dominant or even coherently self-conscious social group. And who can deny that most of the novels in question promote `bourgeois' virtues and denounce `aristocratic' vices? . . . .
Among those critics who have attacked Watt's views on these socioeconomic foundations of the novel, Maximillian Novak [Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe's Fiction (1983)], the preeminent [99 / 100] Defoe scholar of the last thirty years, is notable for the cogency of his objections. . . . Bram Dijkstra['s] Defoe and Economics[: The Fortunes of Roxana in the History of Interpretation (1987)] has defended Watt against Novak . . . . , [arguing] that in challenging Watt's interpretation of economic history Novak was in fact promoting an ahistorical understanding of Defoe's fiction, specifically and especially Roxana" (John Richetti--see below--pp. 99-100); Richetti is defending Watt against attacks.
Watt, Ian. "Serious Reflections on The Rise of the Novel." Novel 1 (1968).
Richetti, John. "The Legacy of Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel." In The Profession of Eighteenth-Century Literature: Reflections on an Institution. Ed. Leo Damrosch. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1992. 95-112.
Schwartz, Daniel R. "The Importance of Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel." Journal of Narrative Technique 13 (1983).
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. N.Y.: Oxford UP, 1987.
Brown, Homer Obed. "Of the Title to Things Real: Conflicting Stories." ELH 55 (1988).
McKeon, Michael. "Generic Transformation and Social Change: Rethinking the Rise of the Novel." Cultural Critique 1 (1985): 159-81.
---. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.
Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.
Bender, John. Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
"His thesis . . . is that the novel from Defoe to Goldsmith is part of the process of cultural production that enabled the [107 / 108] turn from the traditional prison to the modern penitentiary, and more generally that the novel is an active component of the regulating mechanisms that help to form the emerging modern state. . . . Bender's books is [also] overtly an hommage to Watt . . ." (Richetti 107-8).
Richetti, John. Popular Fiction before Richardson: Narrative Patterns, 1700-1739. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1969.
---. "Popular Narrative in the Eighteenth Century: Formats and Formulas." In The First English Novelists. Ed. J. M. Armistead. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1985.
Castle, Terry. Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1986.
Davis, Lennard. Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. New York: Columbia UP, 1983.
---. Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987.
Gallagher, Catherine. Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994.
Hunter, J. Paul. Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. New York: Norton, 1990.