Open Questions
The First Novel Question
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Literary historians have proposed rival candidates for the title of "first novel," and no consensus exists because the candidates come from different traditions, languages and centuries and the dispute turns on which formal features count as defining the novel at all: Petronius' Satyricon and Chariton's Callirhoe from the early Roman world, Murasaki Shikibu's eleventh-century Japanese Tale of Genji, the anonymous Spanish Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605), and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) have each been argued as the founding instance by different scholars.
Open Question
The candidates for "first novel" span more than a millennium and several literary traditions, and the disagreement is not a missing fact but a definitional one: scholars do not agree which combination of extended prose, unified plot, and psychologically developed character is required before a work counts as a novel proper rather than a romance, an episodic tale, or a related but distinct earlier form.
What would resolve this No new manuscript discovery would settle this; every candidate work is already well known and studied. The dispute would only narrow if literary scholarship converged on a single, precise definition of "novel" that current comparative and cross-cultural scholarship deliberately declines to fix.
OpenComparative literary history and the theory of the novelNovel (Wikipedia)
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Dissenting Readings (2 dissenting readings)
Why It Is Open
Bloom reads Murasaki Shikibu's handling of intimacy and irony in The Tale of Genji as having anticipated Cervantes, and argues on that basis for Genji, not any European work, as the true beginning of the novel as a form.
A dissenting reading, from an independent laneNovel (Wikipedia), Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia)
Why It Is Open
Watt argues in The Rise of the Novel that the modern novel is a distinct early-eighteenth-century English achievement, tied to formal realism and an emerging middle-class readership, and dates its birth to Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) rather than to any earlier prose narrative.
A dissenting reading, from an independent laneNovel (Wikipedia), Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia)
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