'Till (they); fashion all things fair': Evolutionary meliorism and generic practice in the works of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy

The dissertation examines how George Eliot and Thomas Hardy apply dialogical notions of genre to the project of "meliorism": the gradual improvement of the human situation.;Eliot's rethinking of genre seeks to address the moral consequences of worldly action. In Silas Marner, Eliot brings the capacity for reverence--the memory of god--borne by the completed genre of fairy tale to bear on the openendedness of novel. She uses genre to fuse action and consequence in a relationship of grace which both fills action with meaning (making each task a reverential gesture) and at the same time unburdens it with respect to contingent outcomes. Rather than absolving humanity from the consequences of activity, she compels it to a more intimate moral connectedness with mundane doings. In Middlemarch, Eliot reconceptualizes epic totality, addressing it to the "demand for continuation" described by Bakhtin. As in Silas Marner, she invokes a closural form; here, however, she redeploys epic resources to maintain and relegislate the world. Drawing upon her understanding of Comte, who proposes to effect meliorism through incremental activity and sympathetic interaction, Eliot reimagines heroic achievement as provisional, diffuse participation in the community. For Dorothea Brooke, and others in the novel, "failure" mediates events and constructs reality, while epic ambition forecloses possibility. Eliot's modulation works to generate an "epic of maintenance" which recovers whole classes of persons and activities into the ongoing human project.;In Jude the Obscure and The Dynasts, Thomas Hardy moves toward the execution of a prospective or anticipatory genre which will fuse ontology with epistemology, making knowledge a function of immanence and sensitivity rather than systematic or logical order. Hardy attempts to resolve, by means of generic procedures, the conflict between Schopenhauer's "will" and "representation"; according to Hardy's own cosmology, he seeks to animate the "Immanent Will." This mutation profoundly affects both the integrity of human presence and the accessibility of representations. It registers in Hardy's account of the failed lives of Jude Fawley and Napolean Bonaparte. Finally, like Eliot, Hardy includes in these works an implicit evaluation of his experiment's contribution to the task of meliorism.