In these studies of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, Ian Watt investigates the reasons why the three main early eighteenth -century novelists wrote in the way they did - a way resulting ultimately in the modern novel of th present day. The rise of the middle class and of economic individualism, the philosophical innovations of the seventeenth century, complex changes in the social position of women: these are some of the factors he finds underlying an age which produced the authors of Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, and Tom Jones. ...