Myths of Modern Individualism

In their original versions, the ultimate fates of Faust, Don Quixote, and Don Juan reflect the anti-individuals of their time: Faust and Don Juan are punished in hellfire, and Don Quixote is mocked. A century later, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe embodies a more favourable consideration of the individual. Ian Watt examines these four myths of the modern world, all created in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, as distinctive products of a historically new society.

Preface; Introduction; Part I. Three Renaissance Myths: 1. From George Faust to Faustbuch; 2. The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus; 3. Don Quixote of La Mancha; 4. El Burlador and Don Juan; 5. Renaissance individualism and the Counter-Reformation; Part II. From Puritan Ethic to Romantic Apotheosis: 6. Robinson Crusoe; 7. Crusoe, ideology, and theory; 8. Romantic apotheosis of Renaissance myths; 9. Myth and individualism; Coda: Thoughts on the Twentieth Century: Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus; Michael Tournier’s Friday; Some notes on the present; Appendix; Index.

‘Like all of Watt’s work this is a remarkable work of the historical imagination … This is a book everyone should read.’ Edward Said

‘It is a work of great maturity, testimony to the intelligence and civility of its author.’ Frank Kermode

‘Watt has dug deep and come up with indispensable revelations about where we come from and where we are now as we ‘individuals’ grapple with our inescapable complaints about, yet need for, ‘society’.’ The Boston Book Review