The Rise of the Novel?

Above is an 18th-century illustration from Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, one of the novels that literary scholar Ian Watt considered among the origins of the genre. 

At some point, I am going to reread and review Watt's book, but for now here is a useful outline of histories of the novel from the University of Freiburg, a German university:

http://www.lit-arts.net/Behn/novel.htm

Here is a link to Ian Watt's obituary.  It will give you an idea of the importance he had in 20th century literary studies.

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2000/january5/watt-15.html

UC Berkeley Professor of Spanish American and Caribbean Literatures and Cultures Richard Rosa made this argument against Watt's history of the novel:

http://www.sobresites.com/alexcastro/artigos/whatisanovel.htm

FYAmuse, here is a link to the Google Books version of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders.  It is one of my favorite novels, and if I were editing our anthology of world literature, I would want to include an excerpt from it as well:

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=RUxV6_7KX30C&dq=moll+flanders&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=JfV4uNzvvG&sig=gi2YvP4SNAT2WtJzPjsRk3XNXhw

I've linked elsewhere to Prof. Taormina's history of the novel, but I think that her page on 18th century novelists will give you an overview of that stage of the continuum.  Note that she is writing about the novel in English.

http://www.nvcc.edu/home/ataormina/novels/history/origins.htm

This page from the University of Missouri at Kansas City outlines the predecessors to the novel:

http://m.faculty.umkc.edu/mallinickd/romanticnovel/whipple/historya.html

Could Oroonoko be like the Italian and Spanish romances mentioned here?

I can't link to Catherine Gallagher's Nobody's Story here, but below is an essay by Ruth Nestvold about women and the history of the novel, beginning with Aphra Behn:

http://www.lit-arts.net/Behn/voice.htm