Inaug.-diss.--Greifswald. / At head of title: Englische philologie. Lebenslauf. "Literaturverzeichnis": p. 137-142.

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1931 H42

William Hale White "Mark Rutherford", (1831-1913) est avant tout connu comme auteur d'une autobiographie romancée écrite sous la pression d'une intense inquiétude spirituelle et métaphysique. Né à Bedford dans un milieu de dissidents non-conformistes, ses écrits ne se font pas seulement l'écho de l'expérience poignante de la perte de la foi et de l'irruption du doute religieux sous l'effet de la critique biblique et du développement de connaissances dans le domaine des sciences, mais ils mettent aussi en évidence avec beaucoup de subtilité le très grand fractionnement du paysage religieux anglais dans une petite ville de province. White ne se considéra jamais comme un professionnel de l'écriture. Il avait cinquante ans lorsqu'il publia The Autobiography (1881) puis The Deliverance (1884), deux courts récits qui constituent lřhistoire fictionnalisée de son expérience personnelle dans lesquels il décrit les difficultés rencontrées par le narrateur-personnage principal dans son désir de trouver une forme de « délivrance » qui lui permette de refonder ses certitudes ébranlées en redonnant à son existence une orientation rassurante et clairement définie. Ce travail accorde une large place à l'histoire des idées religieuses et intellectuelles, aux relations entre religion et culture ; il s'efforce de reconstituer certains aspects du paysage religieux et idéologique de l'époque victorienne à partir de la prise en compte de l'itinéraire de White, qui est entièrement placé sous le signe de la rupture avec les formes les plus traditionnelles de croyance. Il s'intéresse aussi à la dimension sociale, culturelle et éthique des débats spirituels et religieux en Grande-Bretagne. / William Hale White "Mark Rutherford" (1831-1913) is best known as the author of a fictionalized autobiography written under the pressure of intense spiritual and metaphysical concerns during the Victorian period. Born in a non conformist background in Bedford, his writings not only mirror his loss of faith and the Victorian crisis of doubt triggered by Biblical criticism and the new developments in sciences at the time, but they also highlight with great subtlety the varied religious and political landscape in an English country town. White did not consider himself as a professional author. He was fifty when his first works were published. In his fictional autobiographical writings, The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford (1881) and Mark Rutherford's Deliverance (1884), William Hale White describes the agonies of religious doubt in the mid-19th century. This dissertation is not only a study of White's work and background, but also a study of the history of intellectual and religious ideas, as well as an analysis of the social, cultural, ethical and religious debates in Great Britain. The intellectual and historical approach of this work discusses the debates between culture, religion and ethics in the Victorian period.

One aspect of the current revaluation of Victorian thought and literature is the examination of the crisis of religious faith, in which the proponents of doubt and denial took different directions: they became openly cynical and pessimistic; they turned from religion to an aesthetic substitute; or they concluded that since mankind could look only to itself for aid, the primary duties of the individual were to find a tenable creed for himself and to try to alleviate the lot of others. The movement from the agony of doubt to a serene, or at least calm, humanitarianism is the subject of this study. The discussion is limited to four novelists in whose work religious doubt and humanitarianism are overt and relatively consistent and in whose novels the intellectual thought of the day is translated into a form appealing to the middle-class reader. Their success is attested by contemporary criticism and by accounts of the sales of their books; although their work has had no permanent popularity, they were among the most discussed authors of their time.