Narrative Hospitality in Late Victorian Fiction: Novel Ethics

ISBN-13: 9780415628242 / Angielski / Twarda / 2012 / 230 str.

Rachel Hollander

Opis

Bringing together poststructuralist ethical theory with late Victorian debates about the morality of literature, this book reconsiders the ways in which novels engender an ethical orientation or response in their readers, explaining how the intersections of nation, family, and form in the late realist English novel produce a new ethics of hospitality. Hollander reads texts that both portray and enact a unique ethical orientation of welcoming the other, a narrative hospitality that combines the Victorians' commitment to engaging with the real world with a more modern awareness of difference and the limits of knowledge. While classic nineteenth-century realism rests on a sympathy-based model of moral relations, novels by authors such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner present instead an ethical recognition of the distance between self and other.

Recenzje

"This is a thought-provoking, timely intervention in the field of Victorian literature, sympathy, and ethics." - Review 19

Spis treści

1. "The ardent eighties:" Hospitality and realism at the end of the century  2. George Eliot leaves home  3. "This house from this moment is yours and not mine:" Unconditional hospitality in The Woodlanders  4. Unhomely ethics and radical intimacy in The Story of an African Farm  5. Homeless modernity in Jacob’s Room  Afterword: Hospitality of the "post-"

O autorze

Rachel Hollander is Assistant Professor of English at St. John’s University, USA.