The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

by Andrew H. Miller

Overview

Literary criticism has, in recent decades, rather fled from discussions of moral psychology, and for good reasons, too. Who would not want to flee the hectoring moralism with which it is so easily associated-portentous, pious, humorless? But in protecting us from such fates, our flight has had its costs, as we have lost the concepts needed to recognize and assess much of what distinguished nineteenth-century British literature. That literature was inescapably ethical in orientation, and to proceed as if it were not ignores a large part of what these texts have to offer, and to that degree makes less reasonable the desire to study them, rather than other documents from the period, or from other periods.

Such are the intuitions that drive The Burdens of Perfection, a study of moral perfectionism in nineteenth-century British culture. Reading the period's essayists (Mill, Arnold, Carlyle), poets (Browning and Tennyson), and especially its novelists (Austen, Dickens, Eliot, and James), Andrew H. Miller provides an extensive response to Stanley Cavell's contribution to ethics and philosophy of mind. In the process, Miller offers a fresh way to perceive the Victorians and the lingering traces their quests for improvement have left on readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801461316
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	08/15/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	280
File size:	770 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Andrew H. Miller is Professor of English and Director of the Victorian Studies Program at Indiana University and Editor of Victorian Studies. He is the author of Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative.

Table of Contents

Resisting, Conspiring, Completing: An Introduction I Improvement and Moral Perfectionism Moral Perfectionism in the Winter of i866-67 Historical Sources Implicative and Conclusive Criticism PART I. THE NARRATIVE OF IMPROVEMENT i. Skepticism and Perfectionism I: Mechanization and Desire 35 Standing Before Camelot Skepticism as Ungoverned Desire: Browning's Duke Skepticism as Mechanization: Carlyle and Mill Mr. Dombey Rides Death 2. Skepticism and Perfectionism II: Weakness of Will 54 Victorian Akrasia Perspective and Commitment Hard Times and Akrasia Daniel Deronda and Second-Person Relations Orchestrating Perspectives Mark Tapley's Nausea Interlude: Critical Free Indirect Discourse 84 3. Reading Thoughts: Casuistry and Transfiguration 92 Casuistry and the Novel The Theater of Casuistry: Dramatic Monologues Exemplary Criticism PART 11. THE MORAL PSYCHOLOGY OF IMPROVEMENT 4. Perfectly Helpless Iz23 The Reticulation of Constraint Sigmund Freud and Richard Simpson 5. Responsiveness, Knowingness, and John Henry Newman 142z "An Evil Crust Is on Them" The Violence of Our Denials Watching and Imitation Close Reading 6. The Knowledge of Shame 16z Skepticism and Shame Three Scenes of Shame Edith Dombey's Shame Shame and Being Known Shame and Great Expectations Shame and Narration 7. On Lives Unled ix9 Nailed to Ourselves Environments for the Optative The Jamesian Optative Afterword zi29 Notes z23 Bibliography 235

What People are Saying About This

James Eli Adams

The Burdens of Perfection is one of those very rare books that stimulates me to rethink almost everything I know about Victorian literature, and a good deal beyond. In analyzing the nineteenth-century preoccupation with perfectionism, Andrew H. Miller offers a rich, brilliant study of the ethical allure of narration—our appeal to narrative as a means of understanding ourselves, our relations to other people, and what we might become. As he explores the burdens of perfection, Miller offers compelling insights into a broad range of contemporary literary and philosophical reflection, and develops a remarkable and distinctive critical voice of his own.

Stanley Cavell

The passion and the learning throughout Andrew H. Miller's marvelous book constitute a brace of virtues much admired by the Victorians he justly admires. The demonstration that the transcendent novels of the Victorian period precisely confront skepticism with respect to the minds of others serves as a standing rebuke to theories of knowledge in the bulk of what became university philosophy.

Garrett Stewart

Andrew H. Miller's book can't help but seem path-clearing. The Burdens of Perfection is as fresh as it is learned; original in its conception, structure, and emphasis; and notable for the gait and responsiveness of its lucid, meditative prose. Miller's scholarship is seasoned and searching, both assured and bravely speculative, with the readings of fiction often elating in the compressed rightness of their surprise and the exemplarity of their selection.

Regenia Gagnier

In his practice of moral reflection, Andrew H. Miller explicitly reveals what has often been thought but not so well expressed, that literary criticism has returned to ethics. Miller charts this return through philosophers who have not been so visible in our climate of new historicism—Stanley Cavell, Stuart Hampshire, Bernard Williams—and novelists and essayists who have. The results are agitating, like moral improvement.

Editorial Reviews

Andrew H. Miller makes the compelling, persuasive argument that the moral perfectionism so deeply embedded in nineteenth-century writing, particularly in Victorian fiction, represents not a position adopted by some writers and rejected by others but rather 'a field on which writers arrayed themselves.'.

Choice

One of the best books on Victorian writing to have appeared in the last ten years.

Victorian Studies - Philip Davis

Andrew H. Miller makes the compelling, persuasive argument that the moral perfectionism so deeply embedded in nineteenth-century writing, particularly in Victorian fiction, represents not a position adopted by some writers and rejected by others but rather 'a field on which writers arrayed themselves.'.

-- "Choice"

One of the best books on Victorian writing to have appeared in the last ten years.

--Philip Davis "Victorian Studies"

From the Publisher