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

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2016]Copyright date: ©2017Description: 1 online resource (272 p.) : 1 halftoneContent type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780691196640
  • 9781400883738
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 823.809353 23
LOC classification:
  • PR878.E67 R67 2020
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources:
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
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.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9781400883738

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

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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.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 27. Jan 2023)