The process by which, over the course of the 18th, century, the novel became Britain's preeminent, genre. Topics include the relation of novel to, romance, debates over the morality of fiction,, claims of novels not to be novels, women as, readers and writers, and the period's various, subgenres (e.g., epistolary novel, gothic novel,, sentimental novel). Possible authors include Aphra, Behn, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel, Richardson, Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Laurence Sterne, Tobias Smollett, Horace Walpole, Frances Burney, Jane Austen.