From novel to criticism: narrative knowing in the nineteenth century

This dissertation argues that cross-disciplinary discord between literary, philosophical, and scientific writers was central to the formal and aesthetic developments of the British and American novel in the nineteenth century and to the evolution of modern literary criticism. While most scholars of nineteenth-century literature and science work within the “one culture” thesis, emphasizing the shared questions, themes, and techniques among different genres of intellectual writing, my project deviates from these accounts by emphasizing the claims to intellectual priority made, in particular, by novelists. I argue that the realist novels of Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James advance a nonscientific epistemology I call, following Stanley Cavell, “ordinary.” These novels resist the scientific imperatives of definition and generalization and instead focus on the ways that knowledge is created and shared in ordinary life. I suggest that literary realism obviates the potential violence of knowledge relations by shifting the criteria for what it means to know someone or something away from conceptual certainty and towards social responsiveness. Ultimately, I argue that this epistemological framework, which originates in nineteenth-century realism, comes to define modern literary criticism.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference