Description
Book SynopsisExplores the relationship between philanthropy and literary realism in novels by Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Eliot, and William Dean Howells, and examines how each used the figure of philanthropy both to redefine the sentiments that informed social identity and to refashion their own aesthetic practices.
Trade ReviewPhilanthropy in British and American Fiction avoids becoming simply yet another account of how nineteenth-century novelists, for all their sympathetic accounts of the poor, used their art for the consolidation of bourgeois hegemony, by making important claims about the parallels between philanthrophy and literary realism. Times Literary Supplement Christianson persuades us that the relationships among philanthropy, sentimentalism, realism, class, and professionalism are suggestive and worthy of sustained analysis. SEL - Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 Philanthropy in British and American Fiction avoids becoming simply yet another account of how nineteenth-century novelists, for all their sympathetic accounts of the poor, used their art for the consolidation of bourgeois hegemony, by making important claims about the parallels between philanthrophy and literary realism. Christianson persuades us that the relationships among philanthropy, sentimentalism, realism, class, and professionalism are suggestive and worthy of sustained analysis.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements; Introduction; 1. From Sympathy to Altruism: The Roots of Philanthropic Discourse; 2. Dickensian Realism and Telescopic Philanthropy; 3. Hawthorne's 'Cold Fancy' and the Revision of Sympathetic Exchange; 4. Altruism's Conquest of Modern Generalization in Eliot; 5. William Dean Howells's Altrurian Aesthetic in the Modern Marketplace; Coda; Works Cited; Index.
