Amiable fictions: virtual friendship and the English novel【翻译】

dissertation, from its inception in a graduate course
paper to its present form.
My committee members, Garrett Stewart, Lori Branch, Judith Pascoe, and Naomi
Greyser each provided critical feedback at various junctures in the process, and I am very
grateful for their time and advice. Further thanks is due to Professor Stewart, and to the
Andrew W. Mellon foundation, for the summer seminar, “Story in Theory,” in which I
received much assistance in revising the second chapter.
The University of Iowa English Department generously supported my final year
of research with the Elizabeth Dietz fellowship. The University of Iowa Graduate
College’s T. Anne Cleary Fellowship funded my travel to the Victorian and Albert
Museum in London, a trip which allowed me to access Samuel Richardson’s unpublished
correspondence. My thank to the Graduate College for this privilege and also to the
librarians at the Victorian and Albert Museum for their patient assistance.
I want to thank several friends whose advice and conversation has made my
graduate studies more enjoyable. My thanks to James Lambert and Craig Carey who read
and critiqued Chapters 1 and 2 of this project. My thanks to every member of our
graduate lunch group, for their company and many discussions, intellectual and
otherwise. I also am grateful to the Eighteenth-Century Reading Group, including
Andrew Williams and Rebecca Roma Stoll—for our discussions of Tristram Shandy
among other texts—and Bridget Draxler, for her kind mentorship.
Anne, my wife and dearest friend, has supported me in countless ways over the
past six years. Thank you for always being there.
iv
ABSTRACT
This dissertation argues that friendship operates in mid-eighteenth-century
English fiction as a privileged category of virtue, knowledge, and aesthetic value. By
representing social tensions raised by extra-familial friendships and appealing to readers
as friends, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding, Sarah Scott, and Laurence Sterne develop
ideal friendship into a reflexive trope for cultivating authorial identity, framing literary
response, imagining a public sphere, and theorizing social reforms. Amiable Fictions
offers a new way of thinking about the ethical frameworks that shape experimental
narrative techniques at a moment when the English novel is just emerging into cultural
prominence.
In this study, I analyze the ways that these four novelists represent friendships as
allegorical meditations on interpersonal ethics so as to imagine literary exchange as a
virtual form of friendship. For each of these writers, the communicative intimacy of
friendship becomes a basis for theorizing more perfect spiritual and economic unions. On
the level of plot, these fictions unpack the philosophical values of real friendship by
staging its antagonism with persistent forms of patriarchy, aristocracy, and economic
individualism. Drawing from the values of friendship that arise in the plot, these authors
shape narrative exchanges as a tie of friendship. In cultivating an amiable ethos, they
avoid appearing as slavish flatterers in a commercialized literary marketplace, or as
overly didactic figures of institutional authority.
Amiable Fictions builds on studies of the novel genre by accounting for the way a
rhetoric of friendship motivates experiments in narrative form. I offer insights into
developments in epistolary style, free indirect discourse, unreliable narration, anonymous
authorship, and autobiographical form. I suggest that the concept of friendship orients
these writers in their exploration of techniques, propelling them as they articulate a range
of possibilities available for future authors of narrative fiction.
v
This dissertation also engages current scholarly understandings of sociability,
sensibility, domesticity, and public and private life in the mid-eighteenth century. These
novelists deploy friendship as a moral category that challenges codes of sociability,
refines understandings of sympathy, and often antagonizes the emerging cultural
authority of the domestic sphere. Reframing questions of gender and sexuality and their
influence on literary forms, the project highlights how male characters imitate friendship
between women (and vice versa), how social reform impulses raise the need for
heterosexual friendship, and how extra-familial friendship conflicts with domestic norms
as an alternative mediator of public and private character.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………..........….……1
Politics of Friendship and the Novel ......………...….………….. 17
The Authority of Friendship in Early Modern Discourse ………. 23
Domesticity and Distanced Affections…….…………...………...32
Amiable Tutors and Didactic Fictions…….……………..……….40
Transparent Minds, Print Media, and the Public as Friend………46
CHAPTER
I. FRIENDSHIP IN DEATH: REMOTE SYMPATHY
AND LITERARY AFFINITY IN SAMUEL
RICHARDSON’S CLARISSA ……………………………..………….…54
Contexts for Plotting Friendship: Family Romances……….……56
The Modern Elevation of Epistolary Friendship…………....……58
The Feminization of Classical Friendship……..…………….…...67
From Sympathetic Immersion to Virtual Friendship...……….… 80
II. THE ECONOMICS OF FRIENDSHIP AND THE PARADOXES OF
NARRATION IN SARAH FIELDING’S ADVENTURES OF DAVID
SIMPLE AND DAVID SIMPLE, VOLUME THE LAST.……..……....….89
The Wise Security of Legible Minds ……………………………96
Forging an Ethics of Reception for Fictional Deaths ………..…113
III. INSTITUTIONS OF FRIENDSHIP: FEMINIST UTOPIA
AND HETEROSEXUAL PUBLICS
IN SARAH SCOTT’S MILLENIUM HALL……………………………124
Semi-Anonymous Authorship and Commercialized Amity...…. 128
Utopian Economy and Conversable Friendship………….……..135
Friendship’s Fortune: Dividends of Virtue
and Gifts of Providence …….………………………………..…143
Heterosexual Friendship, Genre,
and Allegories of Literary Exchange …………………........….. 154
IV. THE PROMISE AND PRESUMPTION OF FRIENDSHIP IN
LAURENCE STERNE’S TRISTRAM SHANDY…………....……….....161
Familiar Oddity and Unsociable Friendship…………………....165
The Ethics of Friendship
and Sterne’s Elegiac Apostrophe…………..………………...…183
Conclusion: The Politics of Oddity
and the Aesthetics of Friendship………………………………..194
EPILOGUE……………………………………………………………………………..199
BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………..…………..207

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