The image of man and the critic to the Ancien Regime in J. G. Schnabel’s Insel Felsenburg (1731). A contribution to the study of fictional characters in the context of the Frühaufklärung

Abstract

Insel Felsenburg, the most famous German Robinsonade, published some twelve years after Robinson Crusoe, is an outstanding literary document of the early Enlightenment and of certain phenomena that occurred in that context such as the rise of the novel and (very belatedly in the German territories) of the bourgeoisie as a ruling class. The aim of this article is to give an account, through a characterisation of the characters in Schnabel's novel, of the implied theory of individuality. This will allow us to understand the extent to which this theory is structured by the Lutheran doctrine, which the author uses in a creative way for literary purposes to polemicize against the marked optimism that characterizes both the genre of the Robinsonades and, roughly speaking, the historical-literary period of the Frühaufklärung.