ABSTRACT
The end of linear writing is indeed the end of the book. (Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology)(
In 1957, Ian Watt began The Rise o f the Novel by tracing the parallels between the growing popularity of the novel form and a number of contemporary Enlightenment phenomena-the realist epistemology of Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke; the growth of Protestantism with its fondness for personal inventory and for measuring time and progress in the sequential form of the journal or diary; economic individualism, with its division of labor and private property; and the “principle of individu ation” enunciated by Locke:
The “principle of individuation” accepted by Locke was that of exist ence at a particular locus in space and time: since, as he wrote, “ ideas become general by separating them from the circumstances of time and place,” so they become particular only when both these circumstances are specified. In the same way the characters of the novel can only be individualized if they are set in a background of particularized time and place.1
