Genealogies of Imagined Worlds: 6 The Novel and Individual Worlds: Early Modern Construals

With the emergence of the novel in the early modern period, symbolic imagination shifted from collective allegorical machines to the intimate landscapes of individual experience. The novel does not encode worlds within prescribed correspondences; it opens possibility through the construal of singular lives, perspectives, and subjectivities.

Early works such as Cervantes’ Don Quixote dismantle older symbolic orders while inventing a new form: the individual as a world unto themselves. Characters are no longer types in a cosmic or moral drama, but figures whose decisions, delusions, and desires generate new horizons of possibility. The ordinary and the everyday acquire symbolic weight, as construal begins to turn inward—toward psychology, interiority, and personal perspective.

In Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe or Richardson’s Pamela, possibility unfolds not through allegorical correspondence but through the detailed narration of survival, virtue, and moral struggle. Here, construal is perspectival: the lens of a particular narrator or protagonist frames what counts as real, significant, and possible. The novel thus becomes a medium for exploring how symbolic orders are mediated through individual construal.

This turn toward the individual expands the symbolic cosmos: the multiplicity of personal perspectives gives rise to a plurality of worlds. The interior becomes a new frontier of imagination, where symbolic potential is structured by memory, desire, and self-reflection.

The novel’s invention marks a crucial transformation: the collective symbolic orders of myth, scripture, and allegory give way to individuated construals that actualise new possibilities of thought, feeling, and action. Each character, each narrator, each story generates a world. In the novel, possibility itself begins to pluralise in the key of the personal.