So, here's a proposition: The novel was an art form—the art form—of the modern Protestant West, and as the main strength of established Protestant Christendom began to fail in Europe and the United States in recent decades, so did the cultural importance of the novel.
The proposition begins to unravel as soon as we offer it, of course. By the time we are done listing all the demurrals, adjustments, and trimmings, little seems left of the notion that the novel is an artifact of the Protestant West. Little, however. Not nothing. It's hardly a new thesis that the novel exploded out of 18th-century England to become a dominant art form of Western culture. In 1957, for example, the literary critic Ian Watt published a work called The Rise of the Novel, which claimed exactly that. And it's not much of a leap to argue that the Protestantism of those foundational English novelists would have an effect on the shape of the novel down through the ages.
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