The novel is centuries older than we've been told

Like many, I was taught that Samuel Richardson invented the novel in 1740. Such teaching ignores a literary history that goes back to the pre-Christian era
Samuel Richardson
No pioneer ... Pamela author Samuel Richardson. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

I was misled by my advisers, as Bertie Wooster would say. At university in the early 1970s, I was led to believe the novel originated in England in the 18th century, and no professor told me otherwise as I pursued my PhD in the 1980s. Sometimes Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe was mentioned as a prototype, but according to literary dogma the novel experienced a kind of virgin birth with Pamela, Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel of 1740. But outside the walls of academe, in those alternative classrooms called used bookshops, I kept coming across books that certainly looked like novels but obviously predated Pamela. There was not only Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji, a huge novel written around 1010, but the shorter Tale of the Lady Ochikubo, written a few decades earlier. I picked up the Everyman's edition of The Story of Burnt Njal, a 13th-century Icelandic fiction that was labeled a "saga" but looked very much like a realistic novel. I came across multivolume Chinese novels from the Ming Dynasty like The Golden Lotus, a sordidly realistic novel from Shakespeare's time. I read Robert Graves's White Goddess and was puzzled by his reference to "a novel called The Recognitions" that dated from the 4th century. There were novels in the 4th century?

I also came across works of fiction that didn't resemble conventional novels but reminded me of the unconventional, experimental ones I was reading at the time. Apuleius's Golden Ass (written around 160 AD) read like something John Barth might have written, while Petronius's Satyricon (written a century earlier) looked like a Thomas Pynchon novel. Rabelais's 16th-century Gargantua and Pantagruel resembled any number of gargantuan, Rabelaisian 20th-century novels from James Joyce's Ulysses to Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew.

It dawned on me that there was a problem with nomenclature. What most people mean by a novel is the "conventional" novel, or "modern," or "realistic" novel. But I'm more interested in the noun than its qualifying adjectives. While I regard a novel as any book-length work of fiction –a definition endorsed by Webster's dictionary and EM Forster's Aspects of the Novel – most literature professors want to limit the term to realistic fictions set in identifiable sociocultural contexts, especially ones that make psychological probes into human nature. While that definition might exclude a few of the titles above, it describes most of the others to a T. (The Tale of Genji is a realistic novel that displays more psychological insight than almost any European novel before the 20th century.) But unfortunately, the first editors of many of these early novels labeled them "romances" or "sagas" or satires, folk epics, tales, pastorals, legends, picaresques, and other terms, which allowed literature professors to ignore them. Or I should say, those professors who are aware of them: I suspect most professors have never even heard of The Tale of Lady Ochikubo or The Golden Lotus, so their status as novels is a non-issue for them.

I continued to pick up other examples of premodern novels, but it wasn't until recently that I decided to write about them. In the early years of the Bush administration of evil memory, there was a conservative backlash against the innovative, unconventional novels I love, as though their creators were trying to sabotage the great tradition of the novel that began with Pamela. They identified Joyce as the architect of this anarchy, and attacked later saboteurs like Barth, Pynchon, Gaddis, Barthelme, and DeLillo. This struck me as a view that could only be held by someone woefully ignorant of literary history. Joyce was hardly the first to depart from the great tradition of the novel – hello Tristam Shandy – and his minions were simply doing what the most interesting novelists have always done: keeping the novel "novel". The narrow definition preferred by some critics applies only to the most recent segment of fiction's long arc, which began with Egyptian and Sumerian tales in the 20th century BC, and which will continue to metamorphose into novel forms for as long as there are writers. To identify recent, conventional fictions as the only ones deserving the term "novel" is myopic, provincial, and historically uninformed.

Even though I specialise in contemporary fiction, I was intrigued enough by ancient novels, and angry enough at contemporary critics, to attempt a complete history of the novel, with special attention to the innovative ones. There turned out to be many more of those than I expected, for they are familiar only to specialists who rarely communicate with the general public. I figured that if I could spread the word of these early novels to professors and general readers alike, more leniency toward our avant-gardists might result, along with a greater appreciation of the infinite variety of literature's most popular, and misunderstood, genre. Probably won't happen, but I thought I'd give it a shot.

Steven Moore is the author of The Novel: An Alternative History published by Continuum