Epic poetry, drama, and formal rhetoric all have roots reaching back thousands of years, to ancient Greece and well before. The novel, an extended, book-length prose narrative typically focused on realistic characters and plausible events, is a comparatively recent literary form, generally traced by most literary historians to somewhere around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in its recognisably modern shape. Its very name gives the game away: "novel" derives from words meaning "new," a label that stuck precisely because, at the time, this particular way of telling an extended fictional story genuinely was.
What made the novel different from what came before
Before the novel's emergence as a distinct, named form, extended narrative fiction generally took the shape of epic poetry (composed in verse, often drawing on myth or legendary history) or romance (episodic, often fantastical prose narratives loosely connected by a central hero's adventures, without the kind of sustained psychological or social realism later associated with the novel). What distinguished the emerging novel was its sustained focus on ordinary, plausible characters and events, rendered with a level of everyday, believable detail that earlier extended narrative forms generally hadn't attempted — a deliberate departure from myth, legend, and idealised romance toward something closer to a believable account of recognisable human life, even when the specific events depicted were entirely invented.
A form that emerged alongside a new kind of reader
The novel's rise as a distinct, widely consumed literary form is closely tied to broader historical changes: rising literacy rates, the spread of print culture following the printing press, and the emergence of a growing middle-class reading public with both the leisure time and disposable income to buy books for private, individual reading, rather than experiencing literature primarily through public performance or oral tradition. Works like Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Samuel Richardson's Pamela, both from the early eighteenth century, are frequently cited among the early landmark works establishing the novel's recognisable modern shape and its enormous, sustained popular readership, a readership and publishing infrastructure that simply hadn't existed at comparable scale in earlier centuries to support this kind of extended prose fiction.
What we're still unsure about
That the novel emerged as a recognisably distinct literary form in roughly the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, tied to rising literacy and print culture, is broadly accepted literary history. What remains genuinely and actively debated among literary scholars is exactly which work deserves credit as "the first novel," and how sharply the novel can really be distinguished from earlier prose narrative traditions it drew on — some scholars point to earlier prose fiction from various traditions and periods that arguably shares many defining features with the "modern" novel, and the question of where exactly to draw the line between "not yet a novel" and "genuinely a novel" remains more a matter of ongoing scholarly interpretation than a single settled boundary.
This sits inside The Novel as a Form, one of seven topics in Fiction, one of five domains in Literature, one of seventeen subjects the app can quiz you on.