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Ian Watt. Myths of Modern Individualism, Cambridge: Cambridge, 1996. Pp. xii + 293. $27.95.
Mr. Watt's The Rise of the Novel seemed to summarize the best ideas of the time, tempering the prevalent New Critical approach to the novel with a sense of the importance of the social milieu - literacy, economic individualism, conditions of publication - in shaping what was written and what was read during the first half of the eighteenth century. According to the Preface to his new book, he had deviated into his study of the novel after abandoning a work on an even larger subject, "the effects of the alphabet and printing" on modern civilization. The subject of the present book grew out of "Robinson Crusoe as Myth" (1951), in which he had speculated on four great literary myths: Faust, Don Juan, Don Quixote, and the subject of that brilliant discussion, Robinson Crusoe.
Although Mr. Watt remarks that he had been working on this book since 1980, this work was all but completed when his health deteriorated in 1994. That Linda Bree is thanked "for her painstaking and constructive editorial work in the latter stages" suggests this is not an entirely finished book. The sections on the versions of Faust and Don Juan are far less complete than the other two. In treating Don Juan, Molière receives only three solid pages, Byron two. And the section on Robinson Crusoe shows only a...