"The mania for self-observation and self-admiration in literature and the view that a work is the more true and the more convincing, the more directly the author reveals himself in it, are part of the intellectual inheritance of Rousseau. In the next hundred to hundred and fifty years everything of importance in European literature is stamped with this subjectivism. Not only Werther, René, Obermann, Adolphe, Jacopo Ortis, are among the successors of Saint-Preux, but also the heroes in later novels— from Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempré, Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau and Emma Bovary to Tolstoy’s Pierre, Proust’s Marcel and Thomas Mann’s Hans Castorp—are derived from it. They all suffer from the discrepancy between dream and reality and are the victim of the conflict between their illusions and practical, commonplace, middle-class life."
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Chapter 2. The New Reading Public
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arnold_Hauser_(art_historian)
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Arnold Hauser (art historian)
Arnold Hauser (8 May 1892, Timişoara, Romania – 28 January 1978, Budapest) was a Hungarian art historian and prominent marxist in his field. He wrote on the influence of change in social structures on art.
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