| The years between 1870 and 1914 in British literary history have long been recognized as a time of transition from the dominance of the Victorian novel to the explosion of new forms that characterizes modernism. Through a close examination of this period of change, my project locates and defines an "ethics of representation" in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novel. Establishing the relationship between a new willingness to acknowledge the presence of otherness and the problem of novelistic representation in works by George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad, I draw on recent theories of ethics to demonstrate how the novel's shift from realism to modernism can be best understood as an ethical response to unknowability and otherness. Self-consciously aware of the need to test and extend the limits of the Victorian novel, all three authors simultaneously rely on and critique both the themes and the formal conventions of realism, thus creating a hybrid form that defies the traditional categories of realism and modernism. By emphasizing the ethical dimensions of questions of form and knowledge, I argue, it is possible to analyze the attempts of these writers to call into question the traditional moral foundations of the late nineteenth century, and to place these attempts in the context of the problem of representation in general. Demonstrating that the presence of otherness is recognized both within the plot and at the level of narrative structure, my project suggests a new approach to debates about the politics of form in the transition from realism to modernism, as it focuses on the intersection of historical and aesthetic transformations in order to elucidate the ethical investments of the late Victorian novel. |
