Ian Watt > Quotes

“If we're genuinely interested in a book we can even bring ourselves to be greatful when others draw our attention to things we've missed or misunderstood.”
― Ian Watt

“What this popular symbolism amounts to for Herder is a new and more open view of truth: a rejection of literal and rational truth and a preference for the truth of poetry, of imagination, and of symbolism. Here Herder expresses the new Romantic view of the truth of myth: the Greeks had thought, no doubt, that myths were established traditional stories; but they must have understood that the actions of these stories could not have happened, nor their characters have actually existed. In the sixth to fifth century B.C. the Greek philosopher and poet Xenophanes had indeed objected to Homer's view of the gods on the grounds that it was both incredible and immoral; and this negative, literalistic, view of the truth of poetry, or epic, was supported by Plato in the Republic. The opposing assumption - that myths were not exactly true, yet they had a special kind of validity — was more widely held even in the emerging modern world”
― Ian Watt, Mitos do individualismo moderno

“...all the great issues in human life make their appearance on Jane Austen's narrow stage. True, it's only the stage of petty domestic circumstance, but that, after all, is the only stage where most of us are likely to meet them.”
― ian watt

“Later novelists were to see that although formal realism imposed a more absolute and impersonal optical accuracy upon the manner in which literature performed its ancient task of holding a mirror up to nature, there were nevertheless ways in which a moral pattern could be conveyed, although they were perhaps more difficult and indirect than those of previous literary forms. For, in place of direct comment, or the power of tone and imagery, the pattern had to depend upon the manipulation of the mirror in time, in place, in closeness, in brilliance. "Point of view" was to become the crucial instrument whereby the writer expressed his moral sensibility, and pattern came to be the result of the hidden skill whereby the angles at which the mirror was held were made to reflect reality as the novelist saw it.”
― Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding