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Fiction

Western Michigan University

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Full-Text Articles in Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America

"How Should One Love?": Alternative Love Plots And Their Ethical Implications In The Victorian Novel, Jennifer J. Carpentier Jun 2001

"How Should One Love?": Alternative Love Plots And Their Ethical Implications In The Victorian Novel, Jennifer J. Carpentier

Dissertations

In reading Victorian fiction through an ethical lens, I am attentive to questions of what constitutes the good, loving, w ell-lived life. It is my contention that Victorian writers turned to fiction - specifically, the rapidly emerging novel form - to explore the ethical implications of being in love, and the problem s occasioned by erotic love. The writers I examine modify the basic Aristotelian search for a specification of the good life for human beings: they used novels as testing grounds for the ethical question, "How should one love?"

My study of 19th-century British fiction reveals a strain of …