As secularization progresses, the novel’s subjective heroes become arbitrary grotesques

Evidence

Yet as the modern world grows increasingly secularized, the tension which gave Don Quixote its vitality begins to dissolve: the heroes of abstract idealism no longer find their justification in their moment of history, but tend increasingly to become arbitrary, mere grotesques, whose idée fixe is capricious; and in a novelist like Dickens we find a static, lifeless opposition between amusing eccentrics on the one hand, and a sentimentalized middle-class universe on the other (sentimentalized precisely because the novelist has taken it at face value, has smuggled into his work a preconception as to the nature of that external reality which it was the business of the novel to explore without any preconceptions). — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 361

Categorization

• XREF: This is the historical-materialist account of the novel’s degeneration — Dickens as the loss of Quixotic tension. Echoes Jameson’s own Marxist critique of realist sentimentality, connects to reader’s base/superstructure thread. — connects to: The secularization thesis fails to account for religious difference in fiction — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 956; Secularization transferred religious aura to art and literature.; Gods become fiction when their cultural support base drains.

Broader Connections

• The secularization thesis fails to account for religious difference in fiction #expands (0.85) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 956
• Secularization transferred religious aura to art and literature. #corroborates (0.80)
• Gods become fiction when their cultural support base drains. #corroborates (0.80)