William Godwin's 'theatre of calamity': The place of genre in the philosophy of sincerity

The dissertation examines the writing of the British philosopher/novelist William Godwin (1756–1836) both to explore the uses of fiction in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and to consider the transition from an Enlightenment to a more distinctly Romantic epistemology. By treating Godwin's various fictional experiments as an ongoing and evolving “theory of the novel,” the dissertation documents Godwin's focus on the practice of reading and its implications for both Enlightenment philosophy and revolutionary politics. Godwin's philosophical mode of “enquiry” has ultimately less to do with “truth-telling,” or with itemizing “things as they are,” than with the consequences of error or what, as Godwin's fiction shows, might be properly termed ideology. The writing that Godwin produced between 1783 and 1809 includes a diverse array of genres but reveals a consistent suspicion that “truth,” in whatever form, remains compromised by claims to law or institutions and, indeed, by the very conditions of writing itself. Thus, far from striving for transparency, Godwin's genre fiction (including his novels Caleb Williams, St. Leon, and Fleetwood) actually counters all prospects for what he calls “sincerity” by showing the contamination to which genre is always subject.; The dissertation places Godwin's political philosophy and fiction in the context of current debates about theory, ideology, genre, and the subject, where reading and writing are viewed as political, ideological acts. Thus, in addition to locating Godwin in the context of debates about empiricism, discourse, and truth, the dissertation points to the utility of fiction for imaginatively testing the claims of reason and rationality. It sheds additional light on the development of the novel between Smollett and Austen by situating the novel more directly among the genres of philosophical discourse, Romanticism, and history. The work suggests that Godwin's oeuvre, often overlooked today, provides an example of how such hitherto marginalized and problematic texts present what Michel de Certeau has described as an alternative history, literary and otherwise.