<P> Late 17th - century critics looked back on the history of prose fiction, proud of the generic shift that had taken place, leading towards the modern novel / novella . The first perfect works in French were those of Scarron and Madame de La Fayette's "Spanish history" Zayde (1670). The development finally led to her Princesse de Clèves (1678), the first novel with what would become characteristic French subject matter . </P> <P> Europe witnessed the generic shift in the titles of works in French published in Holland, which supplied the international market and English publishers exploited the novel / romance controversy in the 1670s and 1680s . Contemporary critics listed the advantages of the new genre: brevity, a lack of ambition to produce epic poetry in prose; the style was fresh and plain; the focus was on modern life, and on heroes who were neither good nor bad . The novel's potential to become the medium of urban gossip and scandal fuelled the rise of the novel / novella . Stories were offered as allegedly true recent histories, not for the sake of scandal but strictly for the moral lessons they gave . To prove this, fictionalized names were used with the true names in a separate key . The Mercure Gallant set the fashion in the 1670s . Collections of letters and memoirs appeared, and were filled with the intriguing new subject matter and the epistolary novel grew from this and led to the first full blown example of scandalous fiction in Aphra Behn's Love - Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684 / 1685 / 1687). Before the rise of the literary novel, reading novels had only been a form of entertainment . </P> <P> However, one of the earliest English novels, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), has elements of the romance, unlike these novels, because of its exotic setting and story of survival in isolation . Crusoe lacks almost all of the elements found in these new novels: wit, a fast narration evolving around a group of young fashionable urban heroes, along with their intrigues, a scandalous moral, gallant talk to be imitated, and a brief, conciseness plot . The new developments did, however, lead to Eliza Haywood's epic length novel, Love in Excess (1719 / 20) and to Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1741). Some literary historians date the beginning of the English novel with Richardson's Pamela, rather than Crusoe . </P> <P> The idea of the "rise of the novel" in the 18th century is especially associated with Ian Watt's important study The Rise of the Novel (1957). </P>

According to the text which of the following contributed to the rise of the novel