Arnoldian renouncements: Ethical exemplarity and modern thought

This dissertation demonstrates that "renouncement" is the central ethical principle in all of Matthew Arnold's work, poetry and prose, and is the logical corollary of his doctrine of philosophical pessimism. Arnold's ethic of "renouncement" partakes equally of the self-abnegation of Victorian altruism and the will-denial of Schopenhauerian pessimism, and it both forms the goal of his rhetorical strategy and wholly conditions his rhetorical style. To encourage his readers in "renouncement," Arnold deploys a touchstone rhetoric of ethical exemplarity---applying it equally to critical, political, and religious questions---which the "athletes of logic," his muscularly Christian, positivist, and utilitarian critics, then take for proof that the "unmanly" and "effeminate" Arnold has "hardly any power of argument." Largely overlooked by Arnold scholars hitherto, this central trope in Arnold's thought, self-renunciation, reappears today with striking prominence in the religious and ethical turns in philosophy and literary criticism.