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Klappentext 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. Zusammenfassung Ian Watt examines the myths of Faust! Don Quixote! Don Juan and Robinson Crusoe! as the distinctive products of a modern society. The four figures each pursue their own view of what they should be! raising strong questions about their heroes' character and the societies whose ideals they reflect. Inhaltsverzeichnis Introduction; Part I. Three Renaissance Myths: 1. From George Faust to Faustbuch; 2. The tragicall history of the life and death of Doctor Faustus; 3. Don Quixote of La Mancha; 4. El burlador and Don Juan; 5. Renaissance individualism and the Counter-Reformation; Part II. From Puritan Ethic To Romantic Apotheosis: 6. Robinson Crusoe; 7. Crusoe, ideology, and theory; 8. Romantic apotheosis of Renaissance myths; 9. Myth and individualism; Part III. Coda: Thoughts On The Twentieth Century: I. Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus; II. Michel Tournier's Friday; III. Some notes on the present; Appendix.
