Chapter 1 - Moral Ideation in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

Summary

A key feature of the novel of ideas is the prominent role of debates between characters that stage political, philosophical, and ideological differences. Often seen as an especially artificial feature of the genre, character-character dialogue is typically contrasted unfavorably with indirect speech and narratorial description of psychological states. This opposition plays into an implicitly modernism-valorizing view and, ultimately, a privileging of the representation and analysis of thought over the representation of speech. As such, it dovetails in an interesting way with a consequential divide within literary history between idea-driven narrative and an allegedly more nuanced psychological and moral realism. Refusing this opposition, this essay considers nineteenth-century novelistic approaches to moral and political ideas around equality and justice through a complex lens involving the interplay between ruminative states and moments of punctual character-character dialogue. Authors discussed include Henry James, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot.