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Andrew H. Miller - The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature - 9780801477188 - V9780801477188
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The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

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Description for The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature paperback. Num Pages: 278 pages, black & white illustrations. BIC Classification: DSBF. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 228 x 154 x 17. Weight in Grams: 436.

"In some moods, or for some people, the desire to improve can seem so natural as to be banal. The impulse drives forward so much in our culture that it can color our thoughts and shape our actions without being much noticed. But in other moods, or for other people, this strenuous desire becomes all too noticeable, and its demands crushing. It can then drive a sleepless attention to ourselves, a desolate evaluation of what we have been and what we are."—from The Burdens of Perfection

Literary criticism has, in recent decades, rather fled from discussions of moral psychology, and for good reasons, too. Who would not want to flee the hectoring moralism with which it is so easily associated-portentous, pious, humorless? But in protecting us from such fates, our flight has had its costs, as we have lost the concepts needed to recognize and assess much of what distinguished nineteenth-century British literature. That literature was inescapably ethical in orientation, and to proceed as if it were not ignores a large part of what these texts have to offer, and to that degree makes less reasonable the desire to study them, rather than other documents from the period, or from other periods.

Such are the intuitions that drive The Burdens of Perfection, a study of moral perfectionism in nineteenth-century British culture. Reading the period's essayists (Mill, Arnold, Carlyle), poets (Browning and Tennyson), and especially its novelists (Austen, Dickens, Eliot, and James), Andrew H. Miller provides an extensive response to Stanley Cavell's contribution to ethics and philosophy of mind. In the process, Miller offers a fresh way to perceive the Victorians and the lingering traces their quests for improvement have left on readers.

Product Details

Format
Paperback
Publication date
2010
Publisher
Cornell University Press United States
Number of pages
278
Condition
New
Number of Pages
280
Place of Publication
Ithaca, United States
ISBN
9780801477188
SKU
V9780801477188
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-1

About Andrew H. Miller
Andrew H. Miller is Professor of English and Director of the Victorian Studies Program at Indiana University and Editor of Victorian Studies. He is the author of Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative.

Reviews for The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature
Andrew H. Miller makes the compelling, persuasive argument that the moral perfectionism so deeply embedded in nineteenth-century writing, particularly in Victorian fiction, represents not a position adopted by some writers and rejected by others but rather 'a field on which writers arrayed themselves.'.
Choice
One of the best books on Victorian writing to have appeared in the last ten years.
Philip Davis
Victorian Studies

Goodreads reviews for The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature


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