Good Form : The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel / Jesse Rosenthal.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rosenthal, Jesse, author.

Series:

Princeton scholarship online.

Princeton scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ethics in literature.

English fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (271 pages)

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2016]

Language Note:

In English.

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. Bringing together ideas from philosophy, literary history, and narrative theory, Rosenthal shows that we cannot understand the formal principles of the novel that we have inherited from the nineteenth century without also understanding the moral principles that have come with them. Good Form helps us to understand the way Victorians read, but it also helps us to understand the way we read now.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: "Moralised Fables"

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

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

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

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

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

Afterword

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Previously issued in print: 2017.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Mai 2019)

ISBN:

9780691196640

0691196648

OCLC:

1132670388