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Article: Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe.
- Article from:
- Studies in the Novel
- Article date:
- June 22, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 University of North Texas. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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WATT, IAN. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 293 pp. $27.95.
In 1951, Ian Watt published "Robinson Crusoe as a Myth": he began, "Defoe's first full-length work of fiction seems to fall ... into place with Faust, Don Juan and Don Quixote, the great myths of our civilization."(1) In 1957, he published The Rise of the Novel, a book he had begun in 1938 at age 21, before the War and three-and-a-half years as a POW. Chapter three of The Rise of the Novel is "`Robinson Crusoe,' Individualism, and the Novel," and his second sentence begins the argument that the "vast complex of interdependent factors denoted by the term `individualism'" (p. 60) was a ...