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Murasaki Shikibu is the best known writer to emerge from Japan's glorious Heian period. Her novel, The Tale of Genji (Genji-monogatari) is considered to be one of the world's finest and earliest novels. Some argue that Murasaki is the world's first modern novelist.
One of the earliest English-language contributions to the sociology of literature is The Rise of the Novel (1957) by Ian Watt, Professor of English at Stanford University. For Watt, the novel's 'novelty' was its 'formal realism', the idea 'that the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience'.