What First Novels argues

The novel is younger than the epic and older than is usually claimed: long, character-driven prose fiction appears independently in classical Rome, Heian Japan, Gupta India, and Golden Age Spain.
Each tradition reaches the form along a different path — none borrow from another, which is what makes the convergence interesting.
The hexagonal gallery holds the works that arrived first in their language or culture, not the works that perfected the form afterward.

Primary works in First Novels (13)

Epics — The novel inherits epic structure (journey, recognition, return) but trades verse for prose and hero for self.
First Plays — Drama and the novel both interiorize action — drama through dialogue, the novel through reported thought.
Wisdom Literature — Sententiae and gnomic asides survive into the early novel as the narrator's aphorism.
Psychology — The first novels are also the first sustained studies of mind: jealousy in Genji, melancholy in Quixote, isolation in Crusoe.
First Mystery Novels and Stories — The mystery novel grows out of long prose fiction — Collins, Gaboriau, and Doyle inherit the Victorian three-decker structure.
First Science Fiction and Proto Science Fiction Stories — Frankenstein and Gulliver also belong to the speculative-fiction lineage; the hexagonal galleries mirror each other across this evidence.
Fiction Set in Libraries — Bibliophile fiction — Sylvestre Bonnard, The Aspern Papers, Field’s Bibliomaniac — is a 19th-century branch of the long prose form.
First Romance Novels — Romance is the courtship branch of the long prose form — the same novel, viewed through the marriage plot.
First Horror Stories and Novels — The gothic novel is the long prose form's dark twin: Otranto, Udolpho, Frankenstein.