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ETD_2592

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.1/rucore10001600001.ETD.000053344

theses

This dissertation pursues the rich vein of comparative historicism found in the written works of nineteenth-century novelists and naturalists, including Scott, Dickens, Eliot, and Darwin. The Victorian novel shared with contemporary natural history an animating fascination with interconnection, both between individuals, and between individuals and history. "The Age of Analogy" argues that the historical novel formulated this comparative historicism, both as it specified older traditions of analogy as aging modes of outdated speculative philosophy, and honed comparative strategies to examine the historicity of the "age" itself. The linguistic technology of this comparative philological, historical, and scientific analysis transformed older hermeneutic traditions of analogy into sophisticated methods of ethnographic and evolutionary inquiry. Drawing from a range of historicist, linguistic, and informatic approaches, I specify analogy and the comparative method as historically-embedded textual forms that structured engagements of comparison and narrative connection. This thesis analyzes the narrative naturalism of Victorian science, an empiricism that explained heterogeneous scientific observations by coordinating these accounts in narratives of fundamental historical process. While the extensive cultural influence of period science has received substantial critical attention, this thesis reverses the direction of influence, and examines the representational and methodological dependence of mid-century naturalism upon the innovations of socio-historical novels, particularly by Scott and Dickens. Comparative textual strategies reshaped period naturalism, and conditioned the scientific theories, models, and configurations of "objectivity" that nineteenth-century science offered. These comparative practices also challenge the secularization hypothesis as it bears upon Victorian literature and science, by foregrounding how ostensibly secular writers like Eliot and Darwin engaged the hermeneutic tradition of analogy as a set of practices with deep roots in biblical scholarship and natural theology. In gauging the relationship between contemporary observations and past processes, novelists and naturalists alike adapted interpretive strategies first crafted to discern God's fingerprints on creation, and in doing so, created the modern vocabulary of multiplicity and differentiation. Revitalized in the historical novel, historicist analogy gave to Dickens' "innumerable histories of the world" and Eliot's "tempting range of relevancies" a logic of organization, and a vantage from which to survey the extensive interrelation that underwrites nineteenth-century writing.

Ph.D.

Includes abstract

Vita

Includes bibliographical references

by Devin Scott Griffiths

doi:10.7282/T3319VZP

ETD doctoral

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ETD

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