Good form : the ethical experience of the Victorian novel / Jesse Rosenthal.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rosenthal, Jesse.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ethics in literature.

English literature--19th century--Criticism and interpretation.

English literature.

English fiction--19th century--Criticism and interpretation.

English fiction.

Criticism and interpretation.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

xii, 272 pages ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, [2017]

Summary:

What do we mean when we say that a novel's conclusion "feels right"? How did feeling, form, and the sense of right and wrong get mixed up, during the nineteenth century, in the experience of reading a novel? Good Form argues that Victorian readers associated the feeling of narrative form--of being pulled forward to a satisfying conclusion--with inner moral experience. Reclaiming the work of a generation of Victorian "intuitionist" philosophers who insisted that true morality consisted in being able to feel or intuit the morally good, Jesse Rosenthal shows that when Victorians discussed the moral dimensions of reading novels, they were also subtly discussing the genre's formal properties. For most, Victorian moralizing is one of the period's least attractive and interesting qualities. But "Good Form" argues that the moral interpretation of novel experience was essential in the development of the novel form--and that this moral approach is still a fundamental, if unrecognized, part of how we understand novels.

Contents:

Chapter 1 What Feels Right: Ethics, Intuition, and the Experience of Narrative 10

Chapter 2 The Subject of the Newgate Novel: Crime, Interest, What Novels Are About 42

Chapter 3 Getting David Copperfield: Humor, Sensus Communis, and Moral Agreement 78

Chapter 4 Back in Time: The Bildungsroman and the Source of Moral Agency 124

Chapter 5 The Large Novel and the Law of Large Numbers: Daniel Deronda and the Counterintuitive 153.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780691171708

069117170X

OCLC:

951724648