"Defoe and Richardson are the first great writers in our literature who did not take their plots from mythology, history, legend or previous literature. In this they differ from Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton, for instance, who, like the writers of Greece and Rome, habitually used traditional plots;" (3)

Watt argues that new philosophies (by Decartes and Locke), which argued that particular individual perception and experience shape what and how individuals know themselves and the world. This, in turn, opens up new avenues for storytelling. Thus, according to Watt, "the actors in the plot and the scene of their actions had to be placed in a new literary perspective: the plot had to be acted out by particular people in particular circumstances, rather than, as had been common in the past, by general human types against a background primarily determined by the appropriate literary convention. This literary change was analogous to the rejection of universals and the emphasis on particulars which characterises philosophic realism. Aristotle might have agreed with Locke’s primary assumption, that it was the senses which ‘at first let in particular ideas, and furnish the empty cabinet’ of the mind. [5]

Testing out Watt's theories: