I have a student who is interested in tracing the development of the English novel from its origins to the present day (or at least to the start of the twentieth century), and I'm trying to gather information about relevant corpora covering this text type and period.
We know about the European Literary Text Collection (ELTeC, https://www.distant-reading.net/eltec/) which will be very useful for the later end of the timescale. We also know it is possible to assemble a corpus from Project Gutenberg, archive.org, Oxford Text Archive, etc. , but would be interested in re-using any corpora that people might already have made, which aim to be representative of particular periods within this genre.
The student has some flexibility with her research question, so while the original idea of 'English novels' was probably 'novels in English from Great Britain and Ireland', other related areas such as US novels might be interesting as well.
Any tips and suggestions gratefully received. If we get a number of interesting direct emails, I'll be happy to summarize the results to the list.
Best wishes, Martin