In England, the novel established itself as a distinct genre with the works of Daniel Defoe and Richardson in the eighteenth century. Alongside the development of realism in the novel, the exotic and the adventurous continued to be popular. The novelist's tradition does not consist of rules but of certain assumptions about the handling of imagined reality. The element of realism helped in differentiating the eighteenth century fiction from the earlier fiction. The one common feature that binds the works of Richardson, Defoe and Fielding, is the quality of realism. Modern English writers of fiction preserve to maintain the startling element which is an aspect of realism. They have endeavoured to view life realistically, to investigate and explore the secret of the mind, thus proving that the function of a novelist is the revelation of hidden life.