Why does the British novel “rise” in the eighteenth century?

For Ian Watt: the rise of literacy, rise of capitalism, and development of philosophy and science focused on the autonomy and primacy of individual knowledge and perception (Locke, Decartes) as the source of knowledge, experience (e.g., the modern self).

For M.M. Bakhtin:  “After the Renaissance, the present (that is, a reality that was contemporaneous) for the first time began to make sense itself not only as an incomplete continuation of the past, but as something like a new and heroic beginning.” (The Dialogic Imagination 40)

For Cathy Davidson:  the increase in woman’s leisure time, literacy, and lack of formal education played crucial roles in the production and consumption of eighteenth-century novels.