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Just delving a bit into Existentialism and I was wondering if there are any other books BEFORE Kieregaard's time that could be used as an example of an existentialist novel? It can't be that the idea suddenly struck him? There must be traces of like-minded thinking before?
What is an existentialist novel?
Would Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" work? There we have Elizabeth, an individual confronted with the absurdity of the reality around her, trying to make sense out of Darcy.
I'm guessing that the stirrings of Existentialism arose at the same time individuals started contemplating their existence. That kind of questioning spirit was around long before there was a formal name for it. I wouldn't be surprised if it went all the way back to the Greeks. Certainly world religions have elements of self-doubt and questioning of authority, perhaps even in the Old Testament, certainly in the New. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
Consider the characters of Achilles in The Iliad, Odysseus in The Odyssey, Aeneas. Company men for sure, but with a tendency to go rogue. Shakespeare's most famous one-liner: "To be or not to be." (That's not "existential"?) Alexander Pope: "The proper study of mankind is man."
RE: novels, per your original question. Kierkegaard (1813-55) flourished in the first half of the 19th c., just about the same time the novel had firmly established itself as a literary genre. (Early works like Pamela, Tom Jones, etc. were at the time of their first appearanc, more novelities than novels.) But a number of works predating Kierkegaard have aspects that could be interpreted as having an "existential" viewpoint. Two that come to mind are Don Quixote and the world's first "postmodern" novel,Tristram Shandy.
I could go on and on. (But don't worry-- I won't.)
I think that maybe "To be or not to be" would be taken to mean, in the modern idiom, "To take action or not to take action". Existentialist, if you like, I suppose.
I think we need a definition of "existentialism", and it's very difficult to define (!) What follows are notes towards a definition, in the hope of providing a decision procedure for deciding if a novel is existentialist or not.
Sartre defined existentialism as "existence preceding essence." That is, an existentialist creates his own existence. He does not believe he has a pre-existing essence (human nature). Through his actions he makes his existence more significant.
Christians claim that essence precedes existence, i.e., that there is such a thing as human nature, determined by God. This idea of God, and human nature, is forced upon us by religious, political and social authority. A typical claim is that man is essentially selfish, or that he is rational.
Sartre suggested we could freely choose to act as we want in any social situation. He suggested that that we can choose to be either cruel or good because we are neither of these things essentially.
Existence, for Existentialism, is the concrete life of each individual. Certain conditions are "endemic" to human existence, including its inherent meaninglessness, unfairness, and absurdity. Since the world is absurd, a seemingly meaningful life can at any point suddenly lose all its meaning. This can come from a tragedy that "tears a person's world apart", or from enquiry into one's own existence. This can make a person mentally unstable, and avoiding such instability by making people aware of their condition, and ready to handle it, is a central theme of existentialism. It is also claimed that these encounters with the absurd are where we are most in touch with our condition as humans.
The existentialist must also admit that he is in a state of facticity, ie., must admit that the facts of his life limit him and condition his freedom. Much of one's facticity consists of things that one wouldn't have chosen (birthplace, etc.). But your facticity doesn't determine you. To disregard your facticity when making plans for your future is a denial of oneself, and inauthentic. Freedom "produces" angst when limited by facticity.
In existential freedom, you can reconsider and change your actions and values. One is responsible for one's actions and the values one holds. A reference to common values doesn't excuse the individual's actions.
"Existential angst" is a negative feeling arising from the experience of human freedom and responsibility. In standing on a cliff there is *nothing* holding you back from throwing yourself off. If you recognise this freedom, you may suffer a great deal of angst(!) In the case of fear, one can take definitive measures to remove the object of fear, in the case of angst, no such "constructive" measures are possible.
"Existential despair" is loss of hope through an identity crisis. If a person is totally identified with being a research scientist, and fails his PhD, then he may plunge into despair. But existentialist despair is a state one is in even when not overtly in despair. So long as a person's identity depends on qualities that can crumble, he is in despair! And as there is nothing in conventional reality on which to constitute one's sense of identity, despair is a universal human condition.
Existentialists don't see human beings as primarily rational, and assert that people make decisions based on subjective meaning rather than pure rationality. The rejection of reason as the source of meaning is a common theme of existentialist thought, as is the focus on the feelings of anxiety and dread that we feel in the face of our own radical freedom and awareness of death.
Sartre saw rationality as a form of "bad faith", an attempt by the self to impose structure on a world of phenomena that is fundamentally irrational and random. Rationality hinders people from finding meaning in freedom. To suppress anxiety and dread, people confine themselves within everyday experience, relinquishing their freedom for a rational structure imposed by some "Other" person. For instance, they may acquiesce in society's demand to "get a job" when they would rather live off their savings.
Are many of these themes expressed in a novel pre-dating Kirkegaard? A couple of later novels I've recently read, are, I think, existential novels:
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's - Journey to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit, 1932) Often put forwad as the first truly existential novel.
Richard Yates - Revolutionary Road - the "hero" is even described as a "Sartre kind of guy".
But I can't see Pride & Prejudice as an existentialist novel, Darcy and Elizabeth accept their social world as a stable structure that they can inhabit quite happily, with a bit of tweaking. There's no sense of their world being torn apart by tragedy, or of them engaging in radical philosophical thinking. Darcy is a bit of a glum character, but can he be said to be suffering from existential angst? There's no serious exploration of the place of God in their lives, or of the possibility of living with the sense that there is nothing, or of even considering this idea.
I think Dostoyevsky is the nearest one, but he is not "before Kierkegaard", their years of working are crossed. Sartre said in his book "Existentialism is a Humanism" that we can consider "The Brothers Karamazov" as an example of existential crisis.
I always thought of the Bible (as literature and not dogma) was the quintessential Existentialist tract - if you think abiut the New Testament and the Christ figure portryaed this then is the prime existential hero - tragic; misunderstood; alone for the most part and alienated from all but God - since all literature is perhaps a footnote to the Bible this then would be my casted vote but then you might go to Mark Twain for truly solitary heroes - Emerson is the essayist of the transcedent but also a loner hence his brilliance. Dostoyesvsky gets involved here as well.