SOURCE: "Realism and the Novel Form," in his The Rise of the Novel, University of California Press, 1957, pp. 9-34.

In the following excerpt, Watt maintains that a naturalistic or realistic literary technique, rather than subnect matter, is the esential defining characteristic of the realist novel of the eighteenth century.

There are still no wholly satisfactory answers to many of the general questions which anyone interested in the early eighteenth-century novelists and their works is likely to ask: Is the novel a new literary form? And if we assume, as is commonly done, that it is, and that it was begun by Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, how does it differ from the prose fiction of the past, from that of Greece, for example, or that of the Middle Ages, or of seventeenth-century France? And is there any reason why these differences appeared when and where they did?

Such large...