Where the rule perscribes not' : duty and narrative mediation in the eighteenth-century British novel

This dissertation examines the role played by select eighteenth-century novels in mediating between competing ideals of duty or moral obligation. In this respect it follows upon many recent narrative theories which argue that narrative discourse performs important cultural mediations of many kinds. This dissertation borrows the dialectical model of aesthetic mediation imagined by Friedrech von Schiller in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), and argues that each of the novels studied enacts a dialectical compromise between an ideology of duty based on serving self-interest on the one hand, and an ideology of duty based on creating social welfare on the other. The resolution of this cultural dualism occupies a great deal of eighteenth-century thought and literature. This study suggests that the novel, a relatively new genre, was one of the most important forums wherein this cultural impasse was worked out in symbolic form. Such mediations are created by narrative endings which eliminate the tensions or conflicts between these two ideologies of duty. Each of the novels examined here narrates, in its own way, a necessary identity between self-interest and social welfare, promising that each can be served simultaneously. The ideological nature of this imaginary identity is examined in each case.