Georg Lukacs in The Theory of the Novel attempted to determine the extent to which historico-philosophical viewpoint shapes literary genre. Lukacs' aim was to discover what it is about the modern world that leads to a reformulation of epic into the novel. His position, ultimately, is that the novel is a fragmented form, and that its structural problems are" the mirror-image of a world gone out of joint". Lukacs himself soon came to regard The Theory of the Novel as a failure. But surely it is a magnificent failure, a seminal work which establishes the historico-philosophic world view surrounding a work as a precondition for at least the nature of any given genre.