The Solipsism of Modern Fiction: Comedy, Tragedy, and Heroism

In The Solipsism of Modern Fiction, Harold Kaplan deals with the problem of action and its adequate motive in the modern novel. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries modern scientific knowledge abandoned the human-centered view of the universe and thus the fictional modes that had been rooted in religion or myth. The result for fiction was a radical skepticism on the part of the protagonist who now appeared as a reflective, self-critical, passive figure lacking the dynamism of the epic ...