Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Novel" in English language version.
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(translation): The Chinese Tang dynasty novel "Yusenkutsu" [You Xian Ku] is said to be the first novel to come to Japan. In the oldest surviving manuscript at Kongoji Temple in Kawachi Nagano City, Osaka Prefecture, the second half of the manuscript, which was previously missing, has been found. ... "Yusenkutsu" is the work of Zhang Wencheng. It is said to have been introduced to Japan during the Nara period. ... It is also characterized by its fluent writing style, witty dialogue and poetry, and Tomohide Uesugi, a researcher at the Kyoto National Museum (Higashiyama-ku, Kyoto), who discovered the missing parts, said, "Nowadays, it can be considered as a cutting-edge foreign drama, known for its famous writing, and has influenced the Man'yōshū and The Tale of Genji, and has been read in Japan for a long time".
And it is precisely the middle class that Ian Watt (1957) considers as a defining characteristic of the emerging genre of the novel: Watt sees the novel as a genre that developed in the social context of the rise of the Middle Class in England in the first half of the eighteenth century and Defoe has been considered by many critics, including Watt, as one of the fathers of the novel. In The Rise of the Novel; Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (whose subtitle clearly mentions Defoe as an actor in the rise of the genre), lan Watt wrote that "Robinson Crusoe is certainly the first novel in the sense that it is the first fictional narrative in which an ordinary person's daily activities are the center of continuous literary attention." (Watt 1957, 74) There have been disagreements on that issue, and some critics have voiced their hesitations on Robinson Crusoe as the first novel, in Reconsidering the Rise of the Novel (2000) for example. As for Defoe himself, he would never have called his writings "novels" and the "novel" is a label that was given by critics later in the eighteenth century.
And it is precisely the middle class that Ian Watt (1957) considers as a defining characteristic of the emerging genre of the novel: Watt sees the novel as a genre that developed in the social context of the rise of the Middle Class in England in the first half of the eighteenth century and Defoe has been considered by many critics, including Watt, as one of the fathers of the novel. In The Rise of the Novel; Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (whose subtitle clearly mentions Defoe as an actor in the rise of the genre), lan Watt wrote that "Robinson Crusoe is certainly the first novel in the sense that it is the first fictional narrative in which an ordinary person's daily activities are the center of continuous literary attention." (Watt 1957, 74) There have been disagreements on that issue, and some critics have voiced their hesitations on Robinson Crusoe as the first novel, in Reconsidering the Rise of the Novel (2000) for example. As for Defoe himself, he would never have called his writings "novels" and the "novel" is a label that was given by critics later in the eighteenth century.
(translation): The Chinese Tang dynasty novel "Yusenkutsu" [You Xian Ku] is said to be the first novel to come to Japan. In the oldest surviving manuscript at Kongoji Temple in Kawachi Nagano City, Osaka Prefecture, the second half of the manuscript, which was previously missing, has been found. ... "Yusenkutsu" is the work of Zhang Wencheng. It is said to have been introduced to Japan during the Nara period. ... It is also characterized by its fluent writing style, witty dialogue and poetry, and Tomohide Uesugi, a researcher at the Kyoto National Museum (Higashiyama-ku, Kyoto), who discovered the missing parts, said, "Nowadays, it can be considered as a cutting-edge foreign drama, known for its famous writing, and has influenced the Man'yōshū and The Tale of Genji, and has been read in Japan for a long time".
