Sketches, Impressions and Confessions: Literature as Experiment in the Nineteenth Century

In this dissertation, I argue for the existence and critical relevance of a program of experimental literature in the long nineteenth century, developed in the aesthetics of German Romanticism and adapted in a set of texts by Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. My introduction positions this argument in context of larger debates concerning form, theory and literary capacity, provides points of connection between these authors, and outlines the most prominent features of experimental literature. In the first chapter, I present an unorthodox reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, accompanied by a brief account of the literary-critical practice of the Athenaeum circle in Germany, as a means of establishing the philosophical values and theoretical underpinnings of the project of experimental literature. As Kant, Schlegel and cohort upheld ideals of beauty and literature grounded in unpredictable productivity and experimentation, De Quincey, Dickens and Eliot produced texts that seek to realize unanticipated connections in thought and sensation, following lines of association and speculation. Next, I argue that De Quincey’s depiction of Kant as producer of accumulative sentences and texts can provide a useful means of reading the literary experiments of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and for complicating critical accounts of De Quincey’s hostility to Kant. In the third chapter, I read Dickens’s less-known Sketches by Boz and Mudfog Papers as instances of social, scientific and speculative experimentation that deserve to be read in their own light, rather than as anticipations of his novels. In the last chapter, I again offer experimental literature as a means of theorizing literary significance in the eccentric works of a novelist, with Eliot’s “The Legend of Jubal” and Impressions of Theophrastus Such. Far from reproducing an image of a natural and sympathetic realist, in these texts Eliot pursues vagrant lines of literary speculation and cultivates critical difficulty. Taken together, these literary and philosophical texts present an ideal and practice of experimental literature that prioritizes speculation over didacticism, the play of thought and language over their habitual use, and the exercise of criticism, analysis and humor over the veneration of the received and familiar

Writing Duty: Religion, Obligation and Autonomy in George Eliot and Kant

Connections between George Eliot and Immanuel Kant have been, for the most part, neglected. However, we have good reason to believe that Eliot not only read Kant (as well as many who were directly influenced by Kant), but substantially agreed with him on critical and moral issues. This thesis investigates one of the issues on which Kant and Eliot were most closely aligned, the need for duty in morality. Both the English novelist and the German philosopher upheld a vision of duty that could command absolutely while remaining consonant with human freedom and grounding a sense of moral dignity. This vision runs throughout the works of both writers, but is first developed and takes on a particular urgency in the works examined in this thesis, ranging from some of their early publications to Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Eliot’s Romola. The first chapter discusses duty in the wider context of debates about Divine Command Morality, in which the good is defined by its accord with the will or command of God, and which both Kant and Eliot resisted in formulating their own moral visions (while maintaining the language of law and command). This chapter also discusses evidence we have for Eliot’s familiarity with Kant and establishes critical context for this paper. The second chapter discusses religion – in particular, religious enthusiasm – as a necessary background for duty, which exists in the absence of theological certitude, even as it seeks to preserve something of religion’s capacity to command and its popular scope. Kant’s path to the first Critique led through works foundational for, but also sometimes at odds with the priorities and conclusions of critical science, and Eliot’s first novel was preceded by a critical career that paints a quite different picture of religion than the sympathetic portrait of Dinah Morris. The third chapter deals with three dimensions of duty in Kant and Eliot, autonomy, reflection and respect, primarily through Kant’s second Critique and The Mill on the Floss. In the conclusion, I turn to Romola to illustrate the conflict and indeterminative power inherent in this conception of duty