Quan điểm đương đại

• 1651: Paul Scarron, The Comical Romance, Chapter XXI. "Which perhaps will not be found very Entertaining" (Luân Đôn, 1700). Scarron's plea for a French production rivalling the Spanish "Novels". online edition
• 1670: Pierre Daniel Huet, "Traitté de l'origine des Romans", Preface to Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne comtesse de La Fayette, Zayde, histoire espagnole (Paris, 1670). A world history of fiction. pdf-edition Gallica France
• 1683: [Du Sieur], "Sentimens sur l'histoire" from: Sentimens sur les lettres et sur l'histoire, avec des scruples sur le stile (Paris: C. Blageart, 1680). The new novels as published masterly by Marie de LaFayette. online edition
• 1702: Abbe Bellegarde, "Lettre à une Dame de la Cour, qui lui avoit demandé quelques Reflexions sur l'Histoire" in: Lettres curieuses de littérature et de morale (La Haye: Adrian Moetjens, 1702). Paraphrase of Du Sieur's text. online edition
• 1705/1708/1712: [Anon.] In English, French and German the Preface of The Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians (Albigion, 1705). Bellegarde's article plagiarised. online edition
• 1713: Deutsche Acta Eruditorum, German review of the French translation of Delarivier Manley's New Atalantis 1709 (Leipzig: J. L. Gleditsch, 1713). A rare example of a political novel discussed by a literary journal. online edition
• 1715: Jane Barker, preface to her Exilius or the Banish'd Roman. A New Romance (Luân Đôn: E. Curll, 1715). Plea for a "New Romance" following Fénlon's Telmachus. online edition
• 1718: Johann Friedrich Riederer, "Satyra von den Liebes-Romanen", from: Die abentheuerliche Welt in einer Pickelheerings-Kappe, 2 (Nürnberg, 1718). German satire about the wide spread reading of novels and romances. online edition
• 1742: Henry Fielding, preface to Joseph Andrews (Luân Đôn, 1742). The "comic epic in prose" and its poetics. online edition

Tác phẩm thứ cấp

• Erwin Rohde Der Griechesche Roman und seine Vorläufer (1876) [un-superseded history of the ancient novel] (tiếng Đức)
• Lukács, Georg (13 tháng 3 năm 1971). The Theory of the Novel. trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press. ISBN 0-262-12048-8. 
• Bakhtin, Mikhail. About novel. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin and Luân Đôn: University of Texas Press, 1981. [written during the 1930s]
• Watt, Ian (1957). The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley: University of Los Angeles Press. ISBN 0-520-23069-8.  Watt reads Robinson Crusoe as the first modern "novel" and interprets the rise of the modern novel of realism as an achievement of English literature, owed to a number of factors from early capitalism to the development of the modern individual.
• Burgess, Anthony (1963). The Novel To-day. Luân Đôn: Longmans, Green. 
• Burgess, Anthony (1967). The Novel Now: A Student's Guide to Contemporary Fiction. Luân Đôn: Faber. 
• Ben Edwin Perry The Ancient Romances (Berkeley, 1967) review
• Richetti, John J. (1969). Popular Fiction before Richardson. Narrative Patterns 1700-1739. Oxford: OUP. ISBN. 
• Burgess, Anthony (1970). "Novel, The" – classic Encyclopædia Britannica entry.
• Miller, H. K., G. S. (1970) Rousseau and Eric Rothstein, The Augustan Milieu: Essays Presented to Louis A. Landa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). ISBN 0-19-811697-7
• Arthur Ray Heiserman The Novel Before the Novel (Chicago, 1977) ISBN 0-226-32572-5
• Madden, David; Charles Bane, Sean M. Flory (2006) [1979]. A Primer of the Novel: For Readers and Writers . Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 0-8108-5708-1.  Chú thích sử dụng tham số |coauthors= bị phản đối (trợ giúp) Bảo trì CS1: Văn bản dư (link) Updated edition of pioneering typology and history of over 50 genres; index of types and technique, and detailed chronology.
• Spufford, Magaret, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (Luân Đôn, 1981).
• Davis, Lennard J. (1983). Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-05420-3. 
• Spencer, Jane, The Rise of Woman Novelists. From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford, 1986).
• Armstrong, Nancy (1987). Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-504179-8. 
• McKeon, Michael (1987). The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-3291-8. 
• Reardon (ed.), Bryan (1989). Collected Ancient Greek Novels. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-04306-5. 
• Hunter, J. Paul (1990). Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. New York: Norton. ISBN 0-393-02801-1. 
• Ballaster, Ros (1992). Seductive Forms: Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684-1740. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-811244-0. 
• Doody, Margaret Anne (1996). The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. ISBN 0-8135-2168-8. 
• Relihan, Constance C. (ed.), Framing Elizabethan fictions: contemporary approaches to early modern narrative prose (Kent, Ohio/ Luân Đôn: Kent State University Press, 1996). ISBN 0-87338-551-9
• Reconsidering The Rise of the Novel: Eighteenth Century Fiction, Volume 12, Number 2-3, ed. David Blewett (January-April 2000).
• McKeon, Michael, Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
• Josephine Donovan, Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405-1726 revised edition (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).
• Simons, Olaf (2001). Marteaus Europa, oder, Der Roman, bevor er Literatur wurde: eine Untersuchung des Deutschen und Englischen Buchangebots der Jahre 1710 bis 1720. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ISBN 90-420-1226-9.  A market study of the novel around 1700 interpreting contemporary criticism.
• Inger Leemans, Het woord is aan de onderkant: radicale ideeën in Nederlandse pornografische romans 1670 - 1700 (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2002). ISBN 90-75697-89-9.
• Price, Leah (2003). The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot. Luân Đôn: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-53939-0.  from Leah Price
• Rousseau, George (2004). Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature Culture and Sensibility (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). ISBN 1-4039-3454-1
• Mentz, Steve, Romance for sale in early modern England: the rise of prose fiction (Aldershot [etc.]: Ashgate, 2006). ISBN 0-7546-5469-9
• Schultz, Lydia, "Flowing against the traditional stream: consciousness in Tillie Olsen's 'Tell Me a Riddle.'" Melus, 1997.
• Rubens, Robert, "A hundred years of fiction: 1896 to 1996. (The English Novel in the Twentieth Century, part 12)." Contemporary Review, December 1996.