Temporality, Subjectivity and the Representation of Characters in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

In the course of the eighteenth century, the experience of time – and, connected to this, the experience of human existence – underwent profound changes. Here I trace these changes as expressed in the eighteenth-century novel mainly on the basis of two examples, representing two different phases of temporalization of experience: Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-1796).