The extended prose fiction form that emerged in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and became the dominant literary form of the modern world — distinguished from earlier narrative forms by its length, its focus on individual psychological interiority, its engagement with social reality, and its address to a reading public rather than a listening audience. The novel is not merely a literary form but an epistemological one: it develops the capacity to inhabit other minds and imagine other lives.
The novel invented a new way of knowing other people. Not knowing about them — knowing them from the inside, experiencing their thoughts and feelings as if from within. Before the novel, literature gave you characters who acted, spoke, and suffered. The novel gave you characters who thought — who reasoned, doubted, deceived themselves, and changed. This wasn't just a technical innovation. It was a new kind of moral education: the practice of temporarily inhabiting a consciousness that wasn't your own. Whether that practice makes readers more empathetic is debated. That it fundamentally changed what literature could do is not.