When Ortega y Gasset was writing his Notes on the Novel in the nineteen-twenties he could still take it for granted that the fundamental purpose of the novel was the presentation of character:

Indeed, Ortega assumed that this interest was being intensified in the work of Proust, which offered opportunities for the ever greater and more leisurely contemplation of character, even if at the expense of dramatically interesting action. And in so far as Proust— like Joyce—represented the culmination of the realistic novel as well as its destruction, Ortega was not wholly wrong. Nevertheless, I presume that no intelligent modern reader could read his remarks without some slight incredulity. The notion that character can be considered as an absolute, without necessary reference to a given literary context, is a quintessential nineteenth-century concept; it underlies, for instance, Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy, a celebrated work in which the influence of the nineteenth-century novel is everywhere apparent; it has been pilloried in such a statement of twentieth-century critical orthodoxy as L. C. Knights’ How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?