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
Introduction
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
Despite the acutest logic which the ethics of selfishness can use, I hold that philanthropy is a reality; that it has evidence most manifest of being a quality of our nature.
Henry Giles, Illustrations of Genius (1854)Most sick am I my friends, of this sugary disastrous jargon of philanthropy.
Thomas Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850)Modern philanthropy and the realist novel assumed their respective forms at the same point in British and American history and in response to a common set of cultural imperatives. In detailing literary attempts to respond to and shape an increasingly prominent philanthropic discourse in mid- to late nineteenth-century Britain and the United States, this book joins a growing body of scholarship addressing the convergence between aesthetic traditions and other contemporaneous discourses. This period in Anglophone cultural history marks the acceleration if not the beginning of various kinds of convergence that would inform the interrelation of philanthropy and realism, among them the expanding social and political influence of a transnational middle class, the rise of a professional ethos, and the movement toward greater systematisation and rationalisation in the administration of both public and private social welfare policy. The emergence of institutional philanthropy as a primary means of mediating class relations was symptomatic of a broader cultural shift which the literature of the period, novels in particular, registered. The following chapters demonstrate that philanthropy became a favoured trope within literary realism because of its unique utility as a site for the working out of epistemological and aesthetic problems.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Philanthropy in British and American FictionDickens Hawthorne Eliot and Howells, pp. 1 - 30Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007