Description
- Abstract:
- Taking as my point of departure the work of early social scientist and dramatist Henry Mayhew, I examine how early social research appropriates sentimental themes and tropes characteristic of the Victorian novel in order to legitimate and to make accessible to a bourgeois reading public purportedly objective findings about the lives of the lower classes. I argue that sociological investigations instantiated a discursivized power–knowledge that had the practical effect of attempting to impose a totalized correspondence between reading subject as rhetorically constructed and the reading subject as she is taken to exist in the mass audience at large. In other words, the presence of tropes and themes of sentimental novels in works of sociological research legitimized and served to perpetuate existing social relations. I argue that the social sciences represent a reaction to the democratization of culture that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century, and that novelistic discourse was the means by which this reaction could be prosecuted. In so doing I contribute to the ongoing critical dialogue about the relationship between science and literature, while at the same time insisting that the presence of sentimental prose in supposedly objective and scientific sociological reports merits closer attention than it has been given by contemporary criticism.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2012)
Access Conditions
- Rights
- In Copyright
- Restrictions on Use
- Collection is open for research.
Citation
Baumgarthuber, Christine M.,
"Writing the Poverty Line: Dickens, Gissing, Orwell and the Social Scientists"
(2012).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z07P8WPW
