Interfering values in the nineteenth-century British novel : Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, and the ethics of criticism

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.

Author Notes

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

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Moxham (independent scholar, UK) analyzes what he, following David Parker, calls "interference," that is, "the unsettled characteristics of literary utterances that, while trying to relate alternative values, reveal their conflict." Such apparently irresolvable conflicts, characteristic of canonical literature, should stimulate reflection on the practice of ethical decision making itself. In part 1 Moxham discusses how more than a dozen philosophers and critics, notably Alasdair Macintyre and Martha Nussbaum, understand the relationship between imaginative literature and ethical judgment. Part 2 examines the difficulties posed by the heroines of Austen's Mansfield Park, Dickens's Bleak House, and Eliot's Middlemarch. But before he analyzes each of these novels, Moxham first critiques three other critics, usually for willfully shutting down a novel's open-ended ethical debate. Part 3 studies Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, whose heroine's fate suggests that the other novels' ethical systems have shattered altogether. The disquisitions on other scholars contribute little and should have been either eliminated or relegated to footnotes. Worse, Moxham overindulges in passive voice, abstract nouns, nominalized verbs, and the odd syntactical tangle--all of which make for soporific instead of stimulating reading. ^BSumming Up: Optional. Of interest only to research libraries with comprehensive graduate collections in 19th-century literature. M. E. Burstein SUNY College at Brockport

Introduction	p. 1
Part I Introduction	p. 7
1. Reading Philosophically	p. 11
2. Ethical Criticism	p. 29
3. Fractured Works / Edgy Readings	p. 47
Part II Introduction	p. 57
4. Mansfield Park	p. 59
5. Bleak House	p. 101
6. Middlemarch	p. 143
Part III Introduction	p. 189
7. Tess of the D'Urbervilles	p. 193
Bibliography	p. 215
Index	p. 223

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Author Notes

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