Cette thèse porte sur l’œuvre littéraire de trois romancières anglaises du XVIIIe siècle : Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe et Jane Austen. À travers l’analyse de leurs romans, je démontre comment elles ont utilisé ce genre littéraire relativement nouveau, pour aborder les problèmes philosophiques centraux de cette époque. Afin de soutenir que ces écrivaines ont utilisé le roman pour aborder des problèmes philosophiques, je dois démontrer, dans un premier temps, la capacité des œuvres littératires en général à produire un contenu cognitif et à générer des connaissances. Mon propos me conduit ensuite à démontrer comment elles ont contribué significativement à problématiser et explorer ce que j’appelle « Le problème de la Modernité », soit le sentiment d’aliénation produit à l’époque moderne par la séparation entre le sujet humain, le monde et les autres humains. J’expose alors comment ce sentiment d’aliénation est au cœur des romans de Frances Burney, dont les héroïnes, dépossédées de leur identité sociale, errent sans protection, dans un monde hostile. Je démontre également comment les romans gothiques d’Ann Radcliffe, malgré leurs horreurs, offrent un moyen « esthétique » de faire face à cette aliénation. J’explique finalement comment Jane Austen tente de reconstruire le rapport du sujet humain au monde par l’entremise de l’imagination et de la fiction, d’une part, et de notre engagement moral envers autrui, d’autre part. Enfin, l’analyse de leurs œuvres permet de démontrer comment leurs réflexions au sujet de la précarité du sujet moderne rejoint les préoccupations des philosophes avec lesquels ces romancières sont en discussion. / This dissertation looks at the work of three prominent women novelists of the long eighteenth century: Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, and Jane Austen. Through a close analysis of their novels, I demonstrate how mid-eighteenth-century to early nineteenth-century British women authors used the novel, a relatively new literary genre, to engage with some of the central philosophical problems of their time. I explore how novels, being works of fiction, contain certain “truths,” notably forms of knowledge about humans and the world, thus serving as important sources of learning. Since the philosophical problems addressed by philosophers in the eighteenth century were numerous, I narrow their scope significantly, focusing on what I call “the modern predicament,” that is, the sentiment of alienation produced by the separation of the human subject from the world and other humans. I demonstrate how this sentiment of alienation is at the core of Frances Burney’s novels, whose heroines, dispossessed of social identity, wander without much protection in a hostile world. I also demonstrate how Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novels, in spite of their horrors, provide an aesthetic way of coping with personal alienation and imagining a better state of the world. Finally, I show how Jane Austen’s novels suggest ways of reconciling the subject, others, and the world through the literary imagination and mutual sympathy. Most importantly, I show how these women novelists engage with and revise the ideas of modern philosophers.

This thesis proposes a theory of literature's human relevance in literary terms, developing hints in the critical practice of twentieth century literary critic F.R. Leavis. It examines how literary texts can be humanly relevant in a manner that depends on their literary merit, and does so in three stages, interrogating: the way literary texts operate; the role literary language plays in thinking; and the interaction of literature and morality. The thesis has two, related, aims: to reconceptualise literature's relation to human living, and to offer a recharacterisation of Leavis's literary criticism, with the investigation of aspects of Leavis's practice forming part of the more fundamental enquiry regarding the nature of literature's human significance. In the first stage, the thesis argues that Leavis's critical practice in his works of the 1930s (his first major decade of critical output) provides fruitful ways for conceptualising the interaction between form and meaning in literature, with important consequences for present-day understandings of how literature functions and how it matters. It focuses on an untheorised (by him or others) achievement in Leavis's criticism, the introduction of the term 'attitude' into literary analysis and judgement, and argues that the term enables a different mode of attention to the question of how literature relates to the human world. The second stage first interrogates the role that language in general plays in understanding, constructing a hypothesis from arguments by philosophers R.G. Collingwood and Charles Taylor, and then turns to literary language, arguing that it enables a mode of relating to experience not otherwise possible, and forms a process of thinking, for reader and writer alike. The final stage focuses on arguments in aesthetics against literature's cognitive value, and in moral philosophy for its empathic and moral value. Building on earlier arguments about the operation of literary language and language's relation to thought, the thesis claims that literary language is humanly meaningful in a way that is both cognitively and morally significant. Throughout, the thesis argues for the inescapable link between well-written literature and the morally resonant, such that good literature forms what Taylor calls 'moral sources'. The crucial query is how literature functions, which will help us better to answer why it is humanly important. This thesis engages with literary criticism, philosophical aesthetics and moral philosophy, as well as offering close readings of literature itself.