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A Productive Failure: Existentialism In Fin De Siècle England, Maxwell Patchet

Dissertations (1934 -)

In this dissertation, I argue that Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday belong to a broader, transnational tradition of existential novelists. I discuss how recognizing their novels as existential explains why these authors exist in a liminal space in literary criticism, caught between Victorianism and modernism. My dissertation historicizes their existential contribution by placing it within the context of late-Victorian optimism. While their contemporaries celebrated Britain’s technological, imperial, and philosophical strides, Hardy, Conrad, and Chesterton wrote novels that warned against too firm a faith in the …