"...in its capaciousness, intelligence, and wit, and in the barren, theory-obsessed and trivial desert of current criticism, it is something of a phenomenon: a triumph of a truly cultured imagination....Watt has crowned his career with a work of scholarship, literary brilliance, and moral urgency. It is, itself, individualistic and nobly humanist. It is what, after all, criticism is supposed to be." Rocky Mountain Review
"...his erudition and breadth of mind are fully evident as he traces these four figures from their origins through their transformations in the Romantic era to their most recent literary incarnations....This is intellectual and literary history at its best. Recommended for all collections." Choice
"Ian Watt occupies a special place among contemporary critics and historians of literature. He practices a 'synthetic' method: that is, he does not choose between the history of ideas, sociological analysis and formal or stylistic understanding. He masters them all. To this he brings a firm and limpid style, often tinged with irony, never contaminated by jargon." The New Republic
"In its way this is as original a work as Watt's famous first book, The Rise of the Novel. It is a work of great maturity, testimony to the intelligence and civility of its author." Frank Kermode
"Ian Watt's magisterial Myths of Modern Individualism is a critical account--historical, cultural, moral and aesthetic--of how four great Western myths have insinuated themselves into the actualities of modern culture. Like all of Watt's work this is a remarkable work of the historical imagination, sympathetic without being fussy, erudite but always deft, analytic but very warm and witty. This is a book everyone should read." Edward Said
"Where the book shines is in the depth and richness of scores of particular analyses, not only of historical relations and of individual works but of the complex lives of the authors who wrote the works. 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
"This work deserves a wide readership. it is a rich cultural reading of the psychological types that have informed modernity, especially the cult of the individual....This work is a consummate study of the myths of individualism that have informed the personality type of modernity. Recommended." The Reader's Review
"...Watt is to be commended for the erudition and literary insights that inform his treatment of these four shaping myths of our modern individualistic ethic." Michael Shinagel, Harvard Review
"This is the final work by an outstanding and eminent literary critic." John D. Barbour, Religious Studies Review
Product Description
Ian Watt examines the four myths of the modern world, Faust, Don Juan, Don Quixote, and Robinson Crusoe, and their resonance and influence on modern literature and society.
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