Theorists of the novel commonly define the genre as a biographical form that came to prominence in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries __________________________________
as a replacement for traditional sources of cultural authority. The novel, Georg Lukács argues, “seeks, by giving form, to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life” in the interiorized life story of its heroes. The typical plot of the novel is the protagonist’s quest for authority within, therefore, when that authority can no longer be discovered outside. By this accounting, there are no objective goals in novels, only the subjective goal of seeking the law that is necessarily created by the individual. The distinctions between crime and heroism, therefore, or between madness and wisdom, become purely subjective ones in a novel, judged by the quality or complexity of the individual’s consciousness.