Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 From Sympathy to Altruism: The Roots of Philanthropic Discourse
- 2 Dickensian Realism and Telescopic Philanthropy
- 3 Hawthorne's ‘Cold Fancy’ and the Revision of Sympathetic Exchange
- 4 Altruism's Conquest of Modern Generalisation in George Eliot
- 5 William Dean Howells's ‘Altrurian’ Aesthetic in the Modern Marketplace
- Coda
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - William Dean Howells's ‘Altrurian’ Aesthetic in the Modern Marketplace
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 From Sympathy to Altruism: The Roots of Philanthropic Discourse
- 2 Dickensian Realism and Telescopic Philanthropy
- 3 Hawthorne's ‘Cold Fancy’ and the Revision of Sympathetic Exchange
- 4 Altruism's Conquest of Modern Generalisation in George Eliot
- 5 William Dean Howells's ‘Altrurian’ Aesthetic in the Modern Marketplace
- Coda
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The love of mankind, no doubt, needs to be particularized in order to have any power over life and action. Just as there can be no true friendship except towards this or that individual, so there can be no true public spirit which is not localized in some way. The man whose desire to serve his kind is not centred primarily in some home, radiating from it to a commune, a municipality, and a nation, presumably has no effectual desire to serve his kind at all.
T. H. Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation (1883)‘Sympathy – common feeling – … can spring only from like experiences, like hopes, like fears. And money cannot buy these.’
William Dean Howells, Annie Kilburn (1889)Philanthropy in the Economic Novel
The comparative dimension to this study argues that the rigorous satirical treatment philanthropy undergoes in late Victorian fiction, here represented by George Eliot's novels, has a purgative value. Eliot renovates philanthropy by distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate forms of giving. She thus infuses philanthropy with critical substance, while American realism does not invest philanthropy with the same level of authority. Why might this be so? The arc of William Dean Howells's career suggests that the limits of altruism as a social ethic also mark the limits of American realism as a mode of literary representation. Like the works by Dickens, Hawthorne, and Eliot, Howells's fiction connects philanthropy to a theory of representation.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Philanthropy in British and American FictionDickens Hawthorne Eliot and Howells, pp. 171 - 193Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007