Developing Character in the Nineteenth-Century Novel.

Character;Novel;Nineteenth-Century;Bildungsroman;Narrative Theory;Depth;English Language and Literature;Humanities;English Language & Literature

Giordano, CarolinePinch, Adela N. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Character;    Novel;    Nineteenth-Century;    Bildungsroman;    Narrative Theory;    Depth;    English Language and Literature;    Humanities;    English Language & Literature;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/60743/cbgiorda_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation examines the intersection between narratological theories of character and moral understandings of character development in the nineteenth-century novel.Focusing on British and French Bildungsromane, which take character-building as their central conflict, I demonstrate how the novel’s presentation of moral character is inextricable from the construction of character as a narrative form.This interpenetration between morality and form becomes manifest in character’s multiple meanings: ;;character” denotes both a quality one possesses (e.g. ;;Joe has an unsavory character”) and a constitutive element of narrative (along with story, point-of-view, etc.).My broadest goal is to make character a more fundamental concern within narratology, a discipline which tends to privilege the temporal (i.e. plot-centered) aspects of narrative texts.I analyze represented thought—that is, the techniques through which narratives depict the mental lives of characters—to contest the critical assumption that nineteenth-century Bildungsromane figure character development as a portrait of increasing psychological ;;depth.”Moreover, where scholars frequently note the Bildungsroman’s celebration of its protagonist’s transformative growth, I demonstrate how Bildungsromane resist aligning morality with interior change, either by illustrating the losses that attend maturation or by endorsing stasis as a moral value.Chapter One argues that development in Dickens’s David Copperfield and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre requires numerous characters to be ;;sacrificed” from the narrative; the protagonists’ alleged fulfillment relies less on increasing depth than on formal techniques of diminishment.Chapter Two considers how Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Staël’s Corinne figure development not as transformation but as a resistance to change that that can only resolve itself through the protagonist’s death.The next two chapters analyze how the voice of a third-person narrator affects developmental paradigms: Chapter Three examines the phenomenon of indecision in Trollope’s Palliser novels, illustrating how the narrator’s valorization of his characters’ refusal to choose endorses a model of development that diverges from conventions of transformative epiphany previously associated with novelistic maturation.Chapter Four contends that Gissing’s Born in Exile and Flaubert’s Sentimental Education estrange the narrators from protagonists who develop surface qualities rather than inner consciences; both novels thus satirize the representation of psychological depth.