Interfering Values in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

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Interfering Values in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, and the Ethics of Criticism

Jeffrey Moxham

ISBN: 0-313-32283-X

ISBN-13: 978-0-313-32283-9

DOI:

248 pages

Praeger Publishers

Publication: 12/30/2002

List Price: $102.95 (UK Sterling Price: £71.95)

Availability: In Stock

Media Type: Hardcover

Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4

Subjects:

Literature » English Literature
Literature » Critical Theory

Series Title: Contributions to the Study of World Literature

Description: Classic 19th-century British novels that give full expression to complex ethical problems necessarily project the claims of conflicting or interfering values and thus complicate the strategies for resolving the dilemmas they dramatize. This book reasserts the importance of the ethics of reading. It analyzes a developing dialogue between moral philosophers and literary critics, all of whom in their different ways celebrate literature's capacity to confront us with values in conflict. They agree that a key reason for rereading and arguing about classic novels is that they often hypothesize moral dilemmas in more realistically particularized detail than any abstract, rational discussion of ethics could match. But even if novels provide specifically situated explorations of moral issues, this does not mean that they can resolve the problems they dramatize.

This book considers interfering values in novels by Austen, Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy and the difficulties in interpreting these works. Each novel has caused protracted disputes among critics because of its heroine and its conflicting values. Different readings of these novels reveal how critics engage in interpretive strategies to defend or deplore what they read. But while they try to articulate and limit the reader's responses, the novels break through the frames they would impose, thus enlarging our awareness of the problems of making judgments.

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Reading Philosophically
Ethical Criticism
Fractured Works/Edgy Readings
Mansfield Park
Bleak House
Middlemarch
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Bibliography
Index

About the Author: JEFFREY MOXHAM is an independent scholar. He previously was Lecturer in English at Accrington and Rossendale College and part-time tutor at Lancaster University and the University of Central Lancashire.

LCC Class: 823


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