Realism and the cult of altruism: Philanthropic fiction in nineteenth-century America and Britain (Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Eliot, William Dean Howells)

This study seeks to explain how the "cult of altruism"---a central feature of a Victorian and American bourgeois culture by the middle of the nineteenth century---helped shape the aesthetics and production of literary realism. I consider this question in the context of the concomitant rise of political economy and the novel as two discourses that try to account for the role of commercial values in modern society. Philanthropy, both crucial and problematic in both accounts, serves as a contestation site wherein novels seek to reconcile ostensible contradictions between moral philosophy and economic thought. This inquiry engages the work of novelists, social thinkers, economists, and journalists from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth in an effort to demonstrate philanthropy's pervasive and rhetorically complex role in the definition and articulation of modern middle-class values. My investigation of its figural possibilities and rhetorical power focuses on the mutually authorizing relationship between philanthropy and literary realism in novels by such prominent figures as Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Eliot, and William Dean Howells. I examine how each uses the figure of philanthropy both to redefine the sentiments that informed social identity and to refashion their own aesthetic practices.