The cause for this development is the loss of totality through historical changes where the objective institutions of social life became merely conventional, a purely external “second nature” (1916: 62f., 112). This alienation of the individual from her world leads to a situation of “transcendental homelessness” (1916: 40, 60) in which individuals must take up a purely normative stance of a “should be” (1916: 47) towards the world. The novel is always relating to the development of such individuals. This development can take the shape of a subjective-idealist illusion (e.g., as in “Don Quixote”) or of a disillusion, that is, of individuals understanding the impossibility of finding meaning within their world. Lukács thus argues that the novel is the form of epic writing that is appropriate for a specific moment in history. In modernity, epic writing has no longer any distinct form that could express any particular relation between life and essence within a totality. Rather, the form of the novel is an attempt to deal with the absence of this relation (1916: 59; see Jameson 1971: 172).