Tophat1, Oz, and Magoo have already had a discussion concerning the nature of Armstrong's thesis and the relationship between the novel and realism. I, however, was much more bothered by Armstrong's notion later on in that paragraph about the modern subject: "Once formulated in fiction, however, this subject proved uniquely capable of reproducing itself not only in authors but also in readers, in other novels, and across British culture in law, medicine, moral and political philosophy..." and then "To produce an individual, novels had to think as if there already were one, that such an individual was not only the narrating subject and source of writing but also the object of narration and referent of writing" (3). What if there already was such thing as an individual? Someone please correct me if I'm missing the point, but I feel that there is a problem with causation here. I read the whole thing and can find nowhere in which Armstrong shows that the concept of individualism was not simply a manifestation of society that the novel has mirrored.