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Ian Watt:
"The greatness of Descartes was primarily one of method, of the a thoroughness
of his determination to accept nothing on trust; and 1- his Discourse on Method
( 1637) and his Meditations did much to bring about the modern assumption whereby
the pursuit of truth is conceived of as a wholly individual matter, logically
independent of the tradition of past thought, and indeed as more likely to be
arrived at
by a departure from it.
The novel is the form of literature which most fully reflects this individualist
and innovating reorientation. Previous literary forms had reflected the general
tendency of their cultures to make conformity to traditional practice the major
test of truth: the plots of a classical and renaissance epic, for example, were
based on past history or fable, and the merits of the author's treatment were
judged largely according to a view of literary decorum derived from the accepted
models in the genre. This literary traditionalism was first and most fully challenged
by the novel, whose primary criterion was truth to individual experience - individual
experience which is always unique and therefore new. The novel is thus the logical
literary vehicle of a culture which, in the last few centuries, has set an unprecedented
value on originality, on the novel; and it is there-fore well named."
...
"When Defoe … began to write fiction he took little notice of the dominant
critical theory of the day, which still inclined to wards the use of traditional
plots; instead he merely allowed his narrative order to flow spontaneously from
his own sense of what his protagonists might plausibly do next. In doing so
Defoe initiated an important new tendency in fiction: his total subordination
of the plot to the pattern of the autobiographical memoire is as defiant as
assertion of the primacy of individual experience in the novel as Descartes's
cogito ergo sum was in philosophy."
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, Peregrine, 1956, p. 13, 15