In his Theorie des Romans, Georg Lukács contrasted epic and novel as belonging to different worlds: the epic to a more homogenous and evidently meaningful world, in which the epic hero can exhibit an unchallenged code of conduct, while the novel belongs to a world in which meaning and teleology have become problematic, a world without transcendental signposts, in which the individual strives to regain some form of meaning and coherence and where homelessness and the search for a form of totality are characteristic (Lukács 1971: 51, 52). The paradigmatic models for the emerging novel were the biography and the autobiography, the latter, like the novel, a new genre in the seventeenth century, the century of the British enlightenment. Autobiography and novel joined forces as aesthetic templates for the formation of enlightenment individuality, both striving for a containment of secular arbitrarity and chance in an expanding world, characterized by new horizontal and vertical-or geographical and social-dynamics, in whichbesides the loss of epic certainties-the correspondence between station and character could also no longer be taken for granted.1