The scope and nature of this Thesis excludes at once the possibility of dealing exhaustively with so towering and complex a genius as George Meredith. He is so wholly sui generis that neglect of him involves neglect of nothing else, implies no deficiency of taste, no literary limitation. He cannot be placed. He has no derivation and no tendency; and yet he bridges the gap between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries as though the Victorian era had never been. It has, therefore, been natural to concentrate attention of the man's work itself rather than on its relation to that of contemporary or succeeding craftsmen. Considerations of space have made it necessary to isolate certain of his essential conceptions and salient characteristics. These have been considered analytically. While not claiming real novelty for many of the views set forward, there is a considerable degree, especially in the last two chapters. Needless to say, the portions of Meredith about which the critics are agreed, are much more important than anything "new" that can be said about him. For this reason the aim has been to go to the man's work so far as it was compatible with a moderate array of authority. Originality has been sought by going to origins rather than in eccentricity of opinion.

The scope and nature of this Thesis excludes at once the possibility of dealing exhaustively with so towering and complex a genius as George Meredith. He is so wholly sui generis that neglect of him involves neglect of nothing else, implies no deficiency of taste, no literary limitation. He cannot be placed. He has no derivation and no tendency; and yet he bridges the gap between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries as though the Victorian era had never been. It has, therefore, been natural to concentrate attention of the man's work itself rather than on its relation to that of contemporary or succeeding craftsmen. Considerations of space have made it necessary to isolate certain of his essential conceptions and salient characteristics. These have been considered analytically. While not claiming real novelty for many of the views set forward, there is a considerable degree, especially in the last two chapters. Needless to say, the portions of Meredith about which the critics are agreed, are much more important than anything "new" that can be said about him. For this reason the aim has been to go to the man's work so far as it was compatible with a moderate array of authority. Originality has been sought by going to origins rather than in eccentricity of opinion.

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Focusing on four early works, then three from his middle period and three from the 1890s, this dissertation explores Meredith’s role as a novelist in the unfolding of a social and literary paradox, namely, that with the death of George Eliot in 1880, the dominant writers of fiction were male, and this remained the case until the advent of Virginia Woolf, while at the same time the woman’s movement for emancipation in all spheres of life—domestic, commercial, professional and political—was gathering in strength and conviction. None of the late nineteenth-century male novelists—James, Hardy, Moore and Gissing, as well as Meredith—was ideologically committed to the feminist cause; in fact the very term ‘feminist’ did not begin to become current in England until the mid-1890s. But they were all interested in one aspect or another of the ‘Woman Question’, even if James was ambivalent about female emancipation, and Gissing, on the whole, was somewhat hostile. Of all these novelists, it was Meredith whose work, especially in its last two decades, most copiously reveals a profound sympathy for women and their struggles to realize their desires and ambitions, both inside and outside the home, in a patriarchal world. The dissertation therefore concentrates on his presentation of his heroines in their relationships with the men who, in one way or another, dominate them, and with whom they must negotiate, within the social and sexual conventions of the time, a modus vivendi—a procedure that will entail, especially in the later work, some transgression of those conventions. Chapter 1 sketches more than two centuries of development in female consciousness of severe social disadvantage, from literary observations in the mid-seventeenth century to the intensifying of political representations in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, and the rise of the woman’s movement in the course of the Victorian century. The chapter includes an account of the impact on Meredith of John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869), and an examination of some of his female friendships by way of illuminating the experiential component of his insights into the ‘Woman Question’ as reflected in his fiction and letters. His unhappy first marriage is reserved for consideration in Chapter 2, as background to the discussion of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859). This early novel, Meredith’s first in the realist mode, is widely accepted as being of high quality, and is given extended treatment, together with briefer accounts of three other early works, The Shaving of Shagpat (1855), Evan Harrington (1861), and Rhoda Fleming (1865), and one from Meredith’s middle period, Beauchamp’s Career (1876). Two more novels of this period, The Egoist (1879) and Diana of the Crossways (1885), are generally considered to be among his best works, and their heroines are given chapters to themselves (3 and 4). Chapter 5 provides further contextualization for the changing socio-political circumstances of the 1880s and 1890s, with particular reference to that heightening of feminist consciousness represented by the short-lived ‘New Woman’ phenomenon, to which Diana of the Crossways had been considered by some to be a contribution. Brief discussion of some other ‘New Woman’ novels of the 80s and 90s follows, giving literary context to the heroines of Meredith’s three late candidates in the genre, One of Our Conquerors (1891), Lord Ormont and His Aminta (1894), and The Amazing Marriage (1895). The dissertation concludes with a glance at Meredith’s influence on a few early twentieth-century novelists.

Following a general historical discussion of the idea of nature, the study continues with an analysis of the main sources for Tennyson's nature, concept. Here some stress is put upon the temperament of the poet as well as upon his scientific, philosophical and religious affinities with the doctrines of progress and evolution. Chapter three deals with the view of nature in Tennyson's poetry. That Tennyson regarded nature merely as the physical world interpreted by science is demonstrated by a treatment of his poetry that recognizes the different moods of the poet. The conclusion arrived at is that, no matter what mood he was in, Tennyson viewed nature with suspicion. His attempts to embrace pantheism or to escape actuality through mysticism, transcendentalism, or romantic primitivism indicated his failure to reconcile his idea of nature with religious beliefs that demanded personal immortality and absolute morality for man. Because of these emotional needs, Tennyson, especially after the publication of Darwin's scientific treatises on evolution, was forced into a dualism that separated moral (or spiritual) man from a vast, cruel, immoral (or amoral) nature that Tennyson saw as antagonistic to both man and God. For Tennyson man's progress had nothing to do with nature. Chapter four argues that Meredith adopted Goethe's idea that nature is a vital, benevolent being that includes man and God in a unity of the real and ideal worlds. Because Meredith avoided the contradictions that science and Kantian transcendentalism introduced into Tennyson's philosophy, he was able to attain to a conception of the creative and ethical oneness of Earth. Hence he could use Darwinism to clarify his basically Goethian concept of nature, for he abjured the ideas of personal immortality and absolute morality and saw man as a creature of Earth who was progressing toward the harmonious altruistic balance of blood, brain, and spirit that existed in essential humanity. Meredith could rejoice in the struggle of life, which he saw as a struggle for balance and not for existence, because he had from the beginning accepted nature as a beneficent Earth to whose operations man must adjust himself. The last chapter discusses the different approaches of Tennyson and Meredith to nature, their attitudes to nature's law, and their ideas concerning man's place in nature. One argument resulting from this comparison is that Tennyson, applying Kant's transcendental theories and his own emotional reactions to his scientific interpretation of nature, was pessimistic about nature, whereas Meredith, approaching nature by way of the Goethian synthesis and a happy outlook that discerned a desirable mean in all nature's operations, was optimistic about her. Moreover, Meredith's idea of nature was more modern than Tennyson's, for Meredith's belief in altruism and co-operation being the primary law of nature is supported by certain present-day biological and sociological theories. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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