Japanese author Murasaki Shibubi produces, in The Tale of Genji, a book which can be considered the world's first novel

Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes publishes the first part of his satirically romantic novel Don Quixote

John Bunyan publishes The Life and Death of Mr Badman, an allegory of a misspent life that is akin to a novel

Aphra Behn's novel Oroonoko makes an early protest against the inhumanity of the African slave trade

Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, with its detailed realism, can be seen as the first English novel

Samuel Richardson's Clarissa begins the correspondence which grows into the longest novel in the English language

Henry Fielding introduces a character of lasting appeal in the lusty but good-hearted Tom Jones

Voltaire publishes Candide, a satire on optimism prompted by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755

Laurence Sterne publishes the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy, beginning with the scene at the hero's conception

Two books in this year, Émile and Du Contrat Social, prompt orders for the arrest of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

English author Horace Walpole provides an early taste of Gothic thrills in his novel Castle of Otranto

Irish novelist Oliver Goldsmith publishes The Vicar of Wakefield, with a hero who has much to complain about but keeps calm

Goethe's romantic novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, brings him an immediate European reputation

Goethe and Schiller become friends, and together create the movement known as Weimar classicism

US author Charles Brockden Brown publishes Wieland, the first of four novels setting Gothic romance in an American context

Washington Irving uses the fictional Dutch scholar Diedrich Knickerbocker as the supposed author of his comic History of New York

English author Jane Austen publishes her first work in print, Sense and Sensibility, at her own expense

Pride and Prejudice, based on a youthful work of 1797 called First Impressions, is the second of Jane Austen's novels to be published

Two of Jane Austen's novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, are published in the year after her death

Mary Shelley publishes Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, a Gothic tale about giving life to an artificial man

Walter Scott publishes Ivanhoe, a tale of love, tournaments and sieges at the time of the crusades

Washington Irving tells the story of the long sleep of Rip Van Winkle in his Sketch Book

The Spy, a romance set in the American Revolution, establishes the reputation of US author James Fenimore Cooper

James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers introduces Natty Bumppo, frontiersman known for his 'leather stockings'

Italian author Alessandro Manzoni begins publication (completed 1827) of his novel I Promessi Sposi ('The Betrothed')