The Rise of Digital Multimedia Systems

In 1957 Ian Watt published The Rise of the Novel. Promptly recognised as a classic of cultural history, the book analysed the enduring connexions between the distinctive literary qualities of the novel and those of the society in which it began and flourished.1 This society - eighteenth-century western Europe -- had become suddenly complicated. With the waning of the Church and the discrediting of the notion of the divine rights of kings, most European states were experiencing the rise of mercantilism and the bourgeoisie. `Common people began to imagine that they could take charge of their own destiny, that they could define and develop themselves into evolving characters in new settings that they could establish or explore according to their own free will