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.