The rise of the novel in English Literature with references to Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson.

With Daniel Defoe-Robinson Crusoe (1719), novel established itself as a distinct literary type in England. Daniel Defoe-Moll Flanders (1722) – A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) Samuel Richardson – Pamela (1740 ) and Clarissa (1748).
These two novelist contributed to the English novel with their works.These works are the first examples of English novels. Novel is fully developed in the late 19th century and 20th century. 19th century is the great age of European novel.Novel also became very popular in Europe not only in England.
According to Defoe's contemporaries and critics during most of the eighteenth century, Defoe didn't invent anything or conversely he invented everything. That is, he had a powerful reputation for lying, for want of a better word, as Sir Leslie Stephen said. Increasingly, he was credited with somehow producing a single mythic character whose story was sometimes thought, particularly in the nineteenth century, more fit for children or social theorists than for general adult readers. At any rate, he was not always considered the inventor of the novel.
The canonic three founders, Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, took great pains to distinguish what they wrote from what were then called novels. Defoe said very little about genre. He was too busy claiming factual truth or at least authenticity for his narratives. Given the more explicit assertions of a new species of writing by Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, and given their greater discussion of the problem of genre, particularly by Fielding, it is a lot easier to see in their works the invention of a new or transformed genre than it was for contemporaries to discover such novelty in Defoe. At any rate, what Fielding and Richardson wrote came to be called novels rather late in the eighteenth century, and Defoe was often not included in those discussions or paired with Jonathan Swift when he was. The discussions themselves gave only vague definitions at best for the concept of the novel or the problem of genre. Consequently, we know little about how this new meaning given the term novel crowded out the earlier meanings, other than the fact that the production of the earlier kind of novel declined.