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• W4386903564 abstract "Reviewed by: The Decline of the Novel by Joseph Bottum Hannah Rogers The Decline of the Novel. By Joseph Bottum. South Bend, IL: St. Augustine's Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1-58731-198-7. Pp. 153. $25.00. The Decline of the Novel begins with the provocative statement that Western culture has failed the novel (10). Observing that the novel has been supplanted as Western culture's primary art form by new modes of storytelling, Bottum accounts for this shift by analyzing the deeper cultural changes that have caused the novel to decline since the middle of the twentieth century. According to Bottum, the novel has ceased to be an important cultural force because Western culture has abandoned the Protestant assumptions about morality and metaphysics that are the novel's foundation. Bottum's analysis in The Decline of the Novel clearly relies on Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957). Watt claims that eighteenth-century British [End Page 275] novelists Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding wrote the first novels using new techniques that reflected the philosophical, social, and economic changes in Europe at the time. Like Watt, Bottum claims that the novel is the product of Western culture's post-Renaissance break from the medieval understanding of reality, and he similarly asserts that the novel is defined by its focus on particular individuals. However, Bottum differentiates his study from Watt's by focusing, not on the social, philosophical, or economic changes which influenced the development of the novel, but on the growing cultural influence of Protestantism in eighteenth-century England, which he claims was essential to the novel's rise. According to Bottum, the novel's focus on the individual is a fundamentally Protestant focus, reflecting a Protestant concern for the salvation and sanctification of the individual. In focusing on how Protestantism has influenced the novel, Bottum treats a topic that he previously discussed in his book An Anxious Age (2014). Bottum himself suggests that he initially envisioned The Decline of the Novel as a particular application and case-study of the sociological claim he makes in An Anxious Age that the decline of magisterial Protestantism is central to the culture of the United States and northwestern Europe (9). In The Decline of the Novel, Bottum explores how the decline of Protestantism in Western culture has influenced the way writers compose novels and changed how these novels are culturally received. Bottum claims that the novel has declined primarily because its Protestant focus on the individual failed to solve the major cultural crisis of the modern age: the crisis of the self (12). According to Bottum, after Protestantism stripped the external world of the metaphysical significance given it by the medieval Catholic church, the self became reality's sole source of metaphysical significance; the modern self is in crisis because this metaphysical burden is too heavy for it to bear. Since its beginnings, the novel has tried to solve this crisis by reenchanting the impoverished outer world with the thick inner world of the self (12). According to Bottum, this re-enchantment is fundamentally protestant because it relies on the the Protestant story of the individual soul as it strove to understand its salvation and achieve its sanctification (12). By focusing on the interiority of particular characters as they interact with the external world, the novel suggests that an individual's interior development can give meaning to the world; in doing this, it makes the Protestant journey of the individual self toward salvation and sanctification the new source of metaphysical significance for the external world. However, Western culture no longer believes that the novel can solve the crisis of a rich internal self in an impoverished external world because it suffers from an increasing failure of intellectual nerve and terminal doubt about its own progress (5). Due to the decline of Protestant theology and morality, Western culture has abandoned the assumption that it can access the great truths of morality and the structures of the universe by which we could find a guide for personal development (9). As a result, the moral salvation and sanctification which makes up the journey of the individual [End Page 276] self in the novel..." @default.
• W4386903564 created "2023-09-21" @default.
• W4386903564 date "2022-06-01" @default.
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• W4386903564 title "The Decline of the Novel by Joseph Bottum (review)" @default.
• W4386903564 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/chy.2022.0027" @default.
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