DOCSLIB.ORG

Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print Series Editors Anne K. Mellor Department of English, University of California Los Angeles, California, USA Clifford Siskin Department of English, New York University New York, New York, USA Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print features work that does not fit comfortably within established boundaries – whether between periods or between disciplines. Uniquely, it combines efforts to engage the power and materiality of print with explora- tions of gender, race, and class. By attending as well to intersections of literature with the visual arts, medicine, law, and science, the series enables a large-scale rethinking of the origins of modernity. Editorial Board: Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK; John Bender, Stanford University, USA; Alan Bewell, University of Toronto, Canada; Peter de Bolla, University of Cambridge, UK; Robert Miles, University of Victoria, Canada; Claudia Johnson, Princeton University, USA; Saree Makdisi, UCLA, USA; Felicity A Nussbaum, UCLA, USA; Mary Poovey, NewYorkUniversity,USA;JanetTodd, University of Cambridge, UK. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14588 Roger Maioli Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel Fielding to Austen Roger Maioli University of Florida Gainesville, FL, USA Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print ISBN 978-3-319-39858-7 ISBN 978-3-319-39859-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39859-4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016948406 © The Editor(s) (If applicable) and the Author(s) 2016 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu- tional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland To my parents, | Dedico este livro aos meus pais, Eliseu dos Santos & Lurdes Maioli dos Santos PREFACE Between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, the philosophy and the prose fiction of Great Britain came to evince an unprecedented interest in the particulars of experience. Classical empiricism from Francis Bacon to David Hume redirected the attention of philosophers from the stratosphere of rationalism to the discrete data of the senses. At the same time, fictionists from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen turned their gaze from the high plains of romance towards the minute details of everyday life.1 Modern historians of the novel have come to see these two developments as aspects of a single tendency in European culture. In his highly influential TheRiseoftheNovel, Ian Watt described the shift towards particularity in British philosophy and literature as the common expression of a new world picture that had been taking shape since the Renaissance, “one which presents us, essentially, with a developing but unplanned aggregate of particular individuals having particu- lar experiences at particular times and at particular places.”2 For Watt, philo- sophers and novelists were common inheritors of this worldview, which they promoted by means of analogous methods. The procedures developed by the empiricists to investigate the world of experience and document their findings were equally recognizable in the “formal realism” that came to characterize prose fiction. “The novel’s imitation of human life,” says Watt, “follows the procedures adopted by philosophical realism in its attempt to ascertain and report the truth” (31). Like the new philosophy, the rising novel endeavored to portray the circumstantiality of observable life with faithfulness, and it did so in order to “report the truth” and thus enlighten its readers about the world. From Watt’s perspective, the realist novel was more than romance descended from the clouds to please a lowlier taste. It was an agent of the vii viii PREFACE Enlightenment. Through its subject matter and its methods, the novel participated in the contemporary campaign to popularize knowledge of the observable world by means of accessible, unadorned reports. Modern scholars have come to be suspicious of Watt’s progressive narrative, especially for its strict separation between romance and the novel. Still, Watt’s belief that the rises of empiricism and the novel were somehow connected has retained its appeal, and the main tendency of later scholarship has been to reaffirm and refine rather than contest it. The original thesis was given extensive elaboration in Michael McKeon’s The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740, and subsequently taken in new directions in a number of studies by J. Paul Hunter, John Bender, Jonathan Lamb, Jonathan Kramnick, Cynthia Wall, and others.3 For all their variety, these studies broadly conform to Watt’s “collaborative” model; they offer a picture of a mutually reinforcing relationship between empiricism and the novel, showing how the latter either mirrored or appropriated the methodological procedures and pedagogic goals of the former. The picture is essentially this: like empiricism, the novel sought to collect, organize, and make sense of the data of sensory experience, giving pride of place to the here-and-now of English life and inspecting with clinical thoroughness the inner workings of human subjectivity, always in a stylistic register in which denotation trumps adornment. The ultimate goal, again, was to convey knowledge. Defoe and Richardson, no less than Locke or Hume, based their writings on the particulars of experience in order to help readers understand and navigate the real world. The empirical genesis of Moll Flanders or Clarissa allegedly enhanced the power of these novels as vehicles for instruction, making them imaginative counterparts of the political treatise or the moral essay. The empiricist program had only to gain from these developments, as it found in the novel a powerful ally for the popularization of socio-ethical knowledge. As far as the attitude of eighteenth-century novelists go, this collaborative picture has much to recommend it. Fictionists in the period consistently capitalized on the purported connection between the protocols of empiri- cism and the novel’s pedagogic value. Stressing the moral accompanying the fable was a routine gesture in the addresses to the reader that prefaced most narratives at the time, and the moral was usually characterized as a type of empirical inference – a set of conclusions to be drawn from the dizzying array of particular facts documented by the novel. Thus, Defoe characterizes Moll Flanders as “a Work from every part of which something may be learned, and some just and religious Inference is drawn, by which the PREFACE ix Reader will have something of Instruction”; by the same token, the story of Colonel Jack, according to Defoe’s preface, is so rich in lessons “that it would employ a Volume, large as itself, to particularize the Instructions that may be drawn from it.”4 Richardson went Defoe one better and actually produced the volume, listing the lessons yielded by his novels in A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflexions, Contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison (1755). Since it was a matter of no slight importance that the facts yielding the inferences be authentic, novelists often buttressed their teachings by denying (or, in Richardson’s case, de-emphasizing) the novel’s fictionality. Through this well-known maneuver, they were able to validate their lessons by alleging their historical (and hence empirical) grounded- ness. Now, while the false claim to historicity is the most well known, it was not the only way of enlisting the epistemic prestige of empiricism in support of the novel. The genre’s pedagogic program retained its association with empiricism even after the 1740s, when the old authenticating devices entered their slow descent into obsolescence. Midcentury novelists like Fielding, who made no attempt to sell their fictions as fact, nonetheless staked the cognitive value of their novels on a professed faithfulness to observation and experience. Whether in the early or the late eighteenth century, therefore, fictionists with a pedagogical agenda invoked the
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Ian Watt, the Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Chatto & Windus 1957; Rep
    Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Chatto & Windus 1957; rep. Univ. of California Press 1957). Note: this copy has been made from a PDF version of the 1957 California UP edition. The footnotes in that editon have been transposed to endnotes here and the page-numbers have been omitted. Chapter I: Realism and the Novel Form THERE are still no wholly satisfactory answers to many of the general questions which anyone interested in the early eighteenth-century novelists and their works is likely to ask: Is the novel a new literary form? And if we assume, as is commonly done, that it is, and that it was begun by Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, how does it differ from the prose fiction of the past, from that of Greece, for example, or that of the Middle Ages, or of seventeenth-century France? And is there any reason why these differences appeared when and where they did? Such large questions are never easy to approach, much less to answer, and they are particularly difficult in this case because Defoe, Richardson and Fielding do not in the usual sense constitute a literary school. Indeed their works show so little sign of mutual influence and are so different in nature that at first sight it appears that our curiosity about the rise of the novel is unlikely to find any satisfaction other than the meagre one afforded by the terms ‘genius’ and ‘accident’, the twin faces on the Janus of the dead ends of literary history. We cannot, of course, do without them: on the other hand there is not much we can do with them.
    [Show full text]
  • THE RHETORIC of PROBABILITY from the NEW SCIENCE to COMMON SENSE by Alex Solomon
    THE RHETORIC OF PROBABILITY FROM THE NEW SCIENCE TO COMMON SENSE by Alex Solomon A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Literatures in English Written under the direction of Michael McKeon And approved by __________________________ __________________________ __________________________ __________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October 2017 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Rhetoric of Probability from the New Science to Common Sense By ALEX SOLOMON Dissertation Director: Michael McKeon Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, probability, hitherto primarily a quality of rhetoric, expands to become a field of mathematics, a criterion of experimental demonstration, and a guiding principle for the development of the English novel. These applications overlap but are far from coextensive. “The Rhetoric of Probability from the New Science to Common Sense” traces the role of probability, as a fluid concept, in the binding and eventual disassociation of science and fiction during this time. The species of probability generated by fictional narrative is utilized to support empirically indemonstrable hypotheses before and after the rise of experimental culture in the seventeenth century. While the early novel, especially the corpus of Daniel Defoe, has long been spoken of as a fictional imitation of experimental practice, there are significant cases in which fiction is part of the process of experimental demonstration. The exclusively fictional character of the novel later solidifies in the works of Richardson and Fielding as the forms of mathematical and experimental probability developed over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are internalized for aesthetic effect.
    [Show full text]
  • Eighteenth-Century Fiction Volume 33, No. 3 (Spring 2021) Articles Reviews/Critiques
    ECF Eighteenth-Century Fiction Volume 33, no. 3 (Spring 2021) Articles Reading Lovelace’s “Rosebud”: Credits, Debits, and Character in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa Kathryn Blakely 329 Clarissa’s Commerce: Relocations and Relationships in London Elizabeth Porter 349 Mother Gin and the Bad Examples: Figuring a Drug Crisis, 1736–51 Nicholas Allred 369 The Survival of Non-Productive Labour in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man Konstantinos (Kos) Pozoukidis 393 Reflections Are We Global Yet? Africa and the Future of Early Modern Studies Wendy Laura Belcher 413 Reviews/Critiques Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Criticby Marina MacKay Review essay by John Richetti, University of Pennsylvania 447 Enlightened Immunity: Mexico’s Experiments with Disease Prevention in the Age of Reason by Paul Ramírez Review by Travis Chi Wing Lau, Kenyon College 451 Granville Sharp and the Zong Massacre: Sharp’s Uncovered Letter to the British Admiralty, ed. Michelle Faubert Review by Cassander L. Smith, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa 453 The Wreckage of Intentions: Projects in British Culture, 1660–1730 by David Alff Review by Erin Drew, University of Mississippi 455 ECF 33, no. 3 © 2021 McMaster University ii Systems Failure: The Uses of Disorder in English Literature by Andrew Franta Review by Sean Silver, Rutgers University 458 Bellies, Bowels and Entrails in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Rebecca Anne Barr, Sylvie Kleiman-Lafon, and Sophie Vasset Review by Kelly McGuire, Trent University 461 Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century by Christina Lupton Review by Kathleen Lubey, St. John’s University 463 Women’s Domestic Activity in the Romantic-Period Novel, 1770–1820: Dangerous Occupations by Joseph Morrissey Review by Freya Gowrley, University of Derby 466 Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America by Nora Doyle Review by Andrea Charise, University of Toronto Scarborough 469 Écrire en Europe.
    [Show full text]
  • "Myth of the River Kwai"
    Portland State University PDXScholar Special Collections: Oregon Public Speakers Special Collections and University Archives 5-16-1979 "Myth of the River Kwai" Ian P. Watt Follow this and additional works at: https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/orspeakers Part of the American Film Studies Commons, American Popular Culture Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, and the Military History Commons Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Watt, Ian P., ""Myth of the River Kwai"" (1979). Special Collections: Oregon Public Speakers. 185. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/orspeakers/185 This Article is brought to you for free and open access. It has been accepted for inclusion in Special Collections: Oregon Public Speakers by an authorized administrator of PDXScholar. Please contact us if we can make this document more accessible: [email protected]. Ian P. Watt “Myth of the River Kwai” May 16, 1979 Portland State University PSU Library Special Collections and University Archives Oregon Public Speakers Collection http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/11436 Transcribed by Evelyn Birnbaum, June 24 - June 28, 2020 Audited by Carolee Harrison, February 2021 PSU Library Special Collections and University Archives presents these recordings as part of the historical record. They reflect the recollections and opinions of the individual speakers and are not intended to be representative of the views of Portland State University. They may contain language, ideas, or stereotypes that are offensive to others. [static for about fifteen seconds] [recording starts; abruptly stops and starts again] [audience chatting in background] HOST: Hello. Welcome to the 15th annual Nina Mae Kellogg Awards and lecture.
    [Show full text]
  • College of Letters 1
    College of Letters 1 Kari Weil BA, Cornell University; MA, Princeton University; PHD, Princeton University COLLEGE OF LETTERS University Professor of Letters; University Professor, Environmental Studies; The College of Letters (COL) is a three-year interdisciplinary major for the study University Professor, College of the Environment; University Professor, Feminist, of European literature, history, and philosophy, from antiquity to the present. Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Co-Coordinator, Animal Studies During these three years, students participate as a cohort in a series of five colloquia in which they read and discuss (in English) major literary, philosophical, and historical texts and concepts drawn from the three disciplinary fields, and AFFILIATED FACULTY also from monotheistic religious traditions. Majors are invited to think critically about texts in relation to their contexts and influences—both European and non- Ulrich Plass European—and in relation to the disciplines that shape and are shaped by those MA, University of Michigan; PHD, New York University texts. Majors also become proficient in a foreign language and study abroad Professor of German Studies; Professor, Letters to deepen their knowledge of another culture. As a unique college within the University, the COL has its own library and workspace where students can study together, attend talks, and meet informally with their professors, whose offices VISITING FACULTY surround the library. Ryan Fics BA, University of Manitoba; MA, University of Manitoba; PHD, Emory
    [Show full text]
  • NARRATIVE Directions in Econarratology
    ENVIRONMENT New NARRATIVE Directions in Econarratology edited by ERIN JAMES AND ERIC MOREL ENVIRONMENT AND NARRATIVE THEORY AND INTERPRETATION OF NARRATIVE James Phelan and Katra Byram, Series Editors ENVIRONMENT AND NARRATIVE NEW DIRECTIONS IN ECONARRATOLOGY EDITED BY Erin James AND Eric Morel THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS COLUMBUS Copyright © 2020 by The Ohio State University. This edition licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: James, Erin, editor. | Morel, Eric, editor. Title: Environment and narrative : new directions in econarratology / edited by Erin James and Eric Morel. Other titles: Theory and interpretation of narrative series. Description: Columbus : The Ohio State University Press, [2020] | Series: Theory and interpretation of narrative | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Collection of essays connecting ecocriticism and narrative theory to encourage constructive discourse on narrative’s influence of real-world environmental perspectives and the challenges that necessitate revision to current narrative models”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019034865 | ISBN 9780814214206 (cloth) | ISBN 0814214207 (cloth) | ISBN 9780814277546 (ebook) | ISBN 0814277543 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Ecocriticism. | Environmental literature. | Narration (Rhetoric) Classification: LCC PN98.E36 E55 2020 | DDC 809/.93355—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034865 Cover design by Andrew Brozyna Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Minion Pro for Ben and Freddie, my favorites From Erin for Grandmaman, an avid reader and early recommender of books From Eric CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix INTRODUCTION Notes Toward New Econarratologies ERIN JAMES AND ERIC MOREL 1 I. NARRATOLOGY AND THE NONHUMAN CHAPTER 1 Unnatural Narratology and Weird Realism in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation JON HEGGLUND 27 CHAPTER 2 Object-Oriented Plotting and Nonhuman Realities in DeLillo’s Underworld and Iñárritu’s Babel MARCO CARACCIOLO 45 II.
    [Show full text]
  • The Many Faces of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe: Examining the Crusoe Myth in Film and on Television
    THE MANY FACES OF DANIEL DEFOE'S ROBINSON CRUSOE: EXAMINING THE CRUSOE MYTH IN FILM AND ON TELEVISION A Dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of Missouri-Columbia In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy by SOPHIA NIKOLEISHVILI Dr. Haskell Hinnant, Dissertation Supervisor DECEMBER 2007 The undersigned, appointed by the dean of the Graduate School, have examined the dissertation entitled THE MANY FACES OF DANIEL DEFOE’S ROBINSON CRUSOE: EXAMINING THE CRUSOE MYTH IN FILM AND ON TELEVISION presented by Sophia Nikoleishvili, a candidate for the degree of doctor of philosophy, and hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance. Professor Haskell Hinnant Professor George Justice Professor Devoney Looser Professor Catherine Parke Professor Patricia Crown ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the help of my adviser, Dr. Haskell Hinnant, to whom I would like to express the deepest gratitude. His continual guidance and persistent help have been greatly appreciated. I would also like to thank the members of my committee, Dr. Catherine Parke, Dr. George Justice, Dr. Devoney Looser, and Dr. Patricia Crown for their direction, support, and patience, and for their confidence in me. Their recommendations and suggestions have been invaluable. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...................................................................................................ii INTRODUCTION...................................................................................................................1
    [Show full text]
  • Download File
    Truth and Conjecture: Forms of Detection in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction Rashmi Sahni Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2015 © 2015 Rashmi Sahni All rights reserved ABSTRACT Truth and Conjecture: Forms of Detection in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction Rashmi Sahni This study tracks tensions between different modes of knowledge in a body of eighteenth-century fictions centered around themes of detection and punishment of crimes, exemplary among which are Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun (1689), Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724), Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), and William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794). Focusing on crimes as varied as forgery, rape, and murder, this set of fictions raises important questions about eighteenth-century narrative techniques and formal elements. For example, why is the narrator of Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun at once omniscient and limited? Why does the ending of Defoe’s Roxana seem abrupt and inconclusive? Critics struggle to find satisfactory answers to these questions because they often read intrusive narrators, abrupt conclusions, and disconcerting tonal shifts as stylistic faults or as ineptitude at realistic narration. I argue that formal peculiarities of eighteenth-century fiction about criminal investigation are in fact revealing narrative symptoms of an attempt to resolve conflicts between competing theories of knowledge rooted
    [Show full text]
  • Myths of Modern Individualim
    Canto is an imprint offering a range of tides, classic and more recent, across a broad spectrum of subject areas and interests. History, literature, biography, archaeology, politics, religion, psychology, philosophy and science are all represented in Canto's specially selected list of tides, which now offers some of the best and most accessible of Cambridge publishing to a wider readership. In their original versions, the ultimate fates of Faust, Don Quixote, and Don Juan reflect the anti-individualism of their time: Faust and Don Juan are punished in hellfire, and Don Quixote is mocked. The three represent the positive drive of individualism, which brings down on itself repression by social disapproval. A century later Defoe's Robinson Crusoe embodies a more favorable consideration of the individual, but only if one refuses to take seriously Defoe's state- ment that Crusoe's isolation is punishment for disobeying his father. In this volume Ian Watt examines these four myths of the mod- ern world, all created in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, as distinctive products of a historically new society. He shows how the original versions of Faust (1587), Don Quixote (1605), and Don Juan (ca. 1620) presented unflattering portrayals of the three, whereas the Romantic period two centuries later re-created them as admirable and even heroic. Robinson Crusoe (1719) is seen as repre- sentative of the new religious, economic, and social attitudes. All four myths have been transformed, often by major writers (Rousseau, Goethe, Byron, Dostoevsky), and given a more universal application with a favorable view of individualism. The punitive tales were turned into popular secular myths.
    [Show full text]
  • I Defining Properties: Literary Cultivation and National Character
    Defining Properties: Literary Cultivation and National Character in Early American Literature by Magdalena Zurawski Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Thomas Pfau, Supervisor ___________________________ Thomas J. Ferraro ___________________________ Charlotte S. Sussman ___________________________ Priscilla Wald Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2013 i v ABSTRACT Defining Properties: Literary Cultivation and National Character in Early American Literature by Magdalena Zurawski Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Thomas Pfau, Supervisor ___________________________ Thomas J. Ferraro ___________________________ Charlotte S. Sussman ___________________________ Priscilla Wald An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2013 Copyright by Magdalena Zurawski 2013 Abstract In the decades following the English Civil War, as the Anglophone world began transitioning to a social order structured by market and finance capitalism, the word cultivation, which earlier had referred exclusively to agricultural processes, acquired increasingly figurative meanings referring to the development of an individual’s mind, faculties, and manners.
    [Show full text]
  • Some Endangered Feeling
    Some Endangered Feeling Nancy Armstrong This essay sees the recent trend in novels that feature damaged, partial, or wayward protagonists as the ascent of a tradition of formal outliers as old as the novel itself to a position of dominance. Rather than formulate a self-contained individual ca- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/150/1/40/1899866/daed_a_01833.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 pable of defending itself against whatever forces of nature or society might disperse and refigure it, this other tradition gave into those forces, releasing human subjec- tivity from the confines of the self-regulating individual. Why now? How does this major turn in the history of the novel contribute to the current reconsideration of human motivation and behavior in light of affect theory? If Robinson Crusoe pro- vided a bellwether for the individual to come, then what can the damaged protago- nist of Tom McCarthy’s 2005 novel Remainder tell us about the selves we are likely to become? ooking to establish a continuous history of novels in English from Robin- son Crusoe and Clarissa through the major novels of Jane Austen to those of L George Eliot and Henry James, a handful of postwar critics identified the novel’s literary form with the complexity of the problem it posed for its protago- nist. Only by surviving what amounted to an identity crisis could that protagonist become as internally nuanced as the literary text itself. As opposed to those who considered the formation of a self-governing individual a more rudimentary pro- cess, literary critics and historians who sought to add their own favorites to the list of novels distinguished by F.
    [Show full text]
  • The Tree That Bears a Million of Blossoms”
    UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DO RIO GRANDE DO SUL INSTITUTO DE LETRAS PROGRAMA DE PÓS-GRADUAÇÃO EM LETRAS LITERATURAS DE LÍNGUA INGLESA LINHA DE PESQUISA: LITERATURA, IMAGINÁRIO E HISTÓRIA “The Tree that Bears a Million of Blossoms”: A Revaluation of George Eliot’s Romola A View of Florence from San Miniato on a cloudy, rainy day Tese de doutoramento submetida à Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul para obtenção do grau de Doutor em Letras na ênfase Literaturas de Língua Inglesa Doutoranda: Prof a Ms. Jaqueline Bohn Donada Orientadora: Prof a Dr a Sandra Sirangelo Maggio Porto Alegre Novembro, 2012 2 CIP - Catalogação na Publicação Elaborada pelo Sistema de Geração Automática de Ficha Catalográfica da UFRGS com os dados fornecidos pelo(a) autor(a). Bohn Donada, Jaqueline "The Tree that Bears a Million of Blossoms": A Revaluation of George Eliot's Romola / Jaqueline Bohn Donada. -- 2012. 201 f. Orientadora: Sandra Sirangelo Maggio. Tese (Doutorado) -- Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Instituto de Letras, Programa de Pós- Graduação em Letras, Porto Alegre, BR-RS, 2012. 1. Jaqueline Bohn Donada. I. Sirangelo Maggio, Sandra, orient. II. Título. Elaborada pelo Sistema de Geração Automática de Ficha Catalográfica da UFRGS com os dados fornecidos pelo(a) autor(a). 3 aos meus pais, sempre e acima de tudo, pelo carinho, pelo apoio e pelos valores sólidos que me permitem encontrar na obra de George Eliot um eco da minha própria. 4 AGRADECIMENTOS Aos meus pais , em primeiro lugar; À Sandra , minha orientadora querida, que acreditou em mim
    [Show full text]