Form, Individuality and the Novel

This book is a modern classic in literary theory by one of Germany's major critics. Originally published in 1932 and recently rediscovered in Germany, it traces the historical development of "individuality" in the novel. Lugowski aims to show not only how novelists develop characters, but also how the individuality of the novel form itself has been created. In his rejection of realism and his stress on the artificiality of literary creation, Lugowski follows the formalists and early structuralists who were his contemporaries. However, he goes beyond a simple formalist framework to take account of the historical dimensions of the narrative. Thus he provides a scholarly account of the development of narrative forms from early myths and legends to the modern novel. By comparing the forms of myth and the novel, Lugowski is able to trace the ideological shifts which are often concealed by other accounts of narrative development. The ideology of the age, he argues, is revealed in the shift from myths, wherein narrative determines characters, to highly individualist avant-garde texts, where narrative has a less important role.