INDIVIDUALISM ON THE ORIGIN OF THE NOVEL
A link between literature and philosophy
Keywords:
Novel, Philosophy and Literature, Individualism, Watt, DefoeAbstract
British literary critic Ian Watt wrote a seminal work on the origin of the novel, connecting the emergency of this new kind of literature directly to the individualism that was spreading in the England of the 18th century. The author made an extremally rich and innovative analysis for the understanding of the process of how a new notion of individual is produced and diffused in a society and in particular how literature mirrors this novelty, eternizing it as a true snapshot of a social process that is still present in current times. How did the novel served to reveal and spread this idea of an autonomous and socially independent individual? In this work I will discuss the author's treatment on the relation between individualism and the novel, aiming thru this path to understand a bit more the origin and popularization of this new kind of subject, typical of modernity. This relationship, moreover, reflects a close connection between the literature and philosophy of an era; if not a causal relationship, at least as two effects of the diffusion of an idea in the minds of an era
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