Altruism and the Monks of Thelema

Walter Besant ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 151-170
Keyword(s):  
Liberal Education ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Francois Rabelais ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
Liberal Humanism ◽  
Mass Democracy

The central concerns of Besant’s philanthropic novels of the 1880s were anticipated in 1878’s The Monks of Thelema: An Invention, his first sustained foray into social commentary. Although largely neglected by scholars, the novel is an intriguing satire that is rich with contemporary insights. In addressing the dilemmas of philanthropic activism, Besant mocks the naïve idealism associated with Oxford thinkers and undergraduates while finding positive value in their reformist schemes of liberal education for the emerging mass democracy. With the French humanist François Rabelais supplying a model for progressive liberal humanism, amid the satire Besant’s fiction develops a positive ideal of association and moral perfectibility that foreshadows his later, more celebrated work in philanthropy and social reform.

scholarly journals Little, Maybe Less

2020 ◽  
Vol 75 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-238
Author(s):  
Daniel M. Stout
Keyword(s):  
Social Reform ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
Good And Evil

Daniel M. Stout, “Little, Maybe Less: Little Dorrit’s Minimal Moralia” (pp. 207–238) Against our ordinary ways of reading the novel, this essay argues that Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857) represents a stark refusal of the logics of accountability that necessarily underwrite any program of social reform. In pairing its critique of Circumlocution (which programmatically undervalues desert) with its critique of the Marshalsea (which programmatically overstates debt), the novel points not toward a future of happy proportionality—in which innovation might be meaningfully recognized and infractions responded to humanely—but toward a way of thinking that stands outside the liberal logics of exchange (of action and consequence, of sin and redemption, of debt and repayment) that animate both social critique and social reform. Rather than a reformist text, Little Dorrit’s horizon is a world beyond good and evil—or, as we might also call it, after liberalism.

Nonami Asa’s family mysteries: the novel as social commentary

Japan Forum ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-248
Author(s):  
Eileen Mikals-Adachi
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Social Commentary

Reality and Textuality

1992 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-45
Author(s):  
David D. Cooper ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Liberal Education ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
The Past ◽  
Liberal Humanism ◽  
Internal Contradiction ◽  
Moral Debate ◽  
Education Today ◽  
Political Alignments ◽  
Epistemological Relativism

For the past two decades, the humanistic disciplines have been dominated by poststructuralist theories and, more recently, a not unrelated curricular philosophy best defined as hardline multiculturalism, much discussed and often misunderstood. When linked together, they form an internal contradiction that is the moral challenge of liberal education today. Traditional political alignments cannot explain current divisions among the humanities professoriate. Ideological quarrels only obscure a deeper moral debate between an ascendant poststructuralism and a resurgent liberal humanism. It is important to reappropriate liberal humanism in an effort to revitalize humanistic inquiry and renew its place in creative public discourse, and check a danger posed by poststructuralism's fascination with power and epistemological relativism which threaten to erase the ethical border between education and indoctrination.

The Wisdom of the Novel in Richard Rorty’s philosophy as an example of postmodern humanism

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 153-161
Author(s):  
Patryk Kaczmarek
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Liberal Education ◽  
The Novel

The article presents the reconstruction of the edifying subjectivity derived from Richard Rorty’s neopragmatism. The functions of Master Novels that fit the trend of liberal education and postmodern humanism have also been described. I argue in favor of a thesis that the recognition of the Wisdom of the Novel widely spread in culture can contribute to social change. The effect of this change may consist in a decrease in the amount of social exclusion of various groups and the existence of ideological radicalisms, which may contribute to the progression of solidarity among people.

THE WRITER AS THE CONSCIENCE OF HIS SOCIETY: A STUDY OF FESTUS IYAYI’S HEROES

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-342
Author(s):  
Abdullahi Haruna
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The Common ◽  
Creative Writer ◽  
Common Man ◽  
Nigerian Civil War

This article discusses the role of the creative writer as the conscience of his society using Festus Iyayi as an exam-ple. The study focuses on the themes and narrative technique of Iyayi's Heroes to present the author as a literary artist who exposes the corruption and other forms of social evil perpetrated against the common man and the soci-ety generally. Studies show that Iyayi’s Heroes is one of the literary works written on the Nigerian civil war fought between 1967 and 1970. Iyayi’s novel, however, is said to be different from other literary works on the war on account of its neutral perspective on the crisis. This is what informs the choice of the novel for this study. In the novel, Iyayi projects himself as the conscience of society highlighting the deceit, corruption, class-consciousness, insensitivity and avarice to which the common man and the society are subjected by the ruling class using the façade of fighting a civil war. The outcome of this study establishes Iyayi as a conscientious patriot who uses the genre of the novel to highlight the wrongs of Nigerian society with a prescription for social reform.

ANTISEMITISM AND SOCIAL CRITIQUE IN DICKENS'SOLIVER TWIST

2005 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Physical Violence ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social

WHEN SIKES AND NANCY RECAPTURE OLIVER, in Dickens'sOliver Twist, intending to return him to the gang of thieves, Sikes warns Oliver against crying out to passersby, announcing that his dog will go for Oliver's throat if he so much as speaks one word. Looking at the dog, who is eyeing Oliver and growling and licking his lips, “with a kind of grim and ferocious approval,” Sikes tells Oliver, “He's as willing as a Christian, strike me blind if he isn't!” (109; ch. 16). Sikes of course simply intends to say that his dog is as good as human, but Dickens's joke, in the context of the novel, is a chilling one. Sikes's bloodthirsty dogisas willing as the novel has shown many a professed Christian to be to exercise brute power over the weak and helpless, to drive Oliver into a life of crime, and to commit physical violence against him. In the course of the novel, Dickens shows what professed Christians have been willing to do to the poor and invites his readers to contemplate what they as Christians should instead be willing to do.Oliver Twistis of course deeply concerned with the condition of England's poor, and Dickens invokes the idea of Christianity as a rhetorical tool through which to make the social commentary that is at the novel's moral center.

scholarly journals PRIMITIVE CRITICISM AND THE NOVEL: G. H. LEWES AND HIPPOLYTE TAINE ON DICKENS

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-142
Author(s):  
Peter Melville Logan
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Common Knowledge ◽  
Fine Art ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Face ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
Primitive Society ◽  
Hippolyte Taine ◽  
Complex Characters

In a controversial article onthe life and fiction of Charles Dickens, George H. Lewes ponders the inexplicable preference of readers for the novelist's too-simplistic characters over the more complex characters of other writers. He finds an answer in the primitive reaction to fine art: “To a savage there is so little suggestion of a human face and form in a painted portrait that it is not even recognized as the representation of a man” (“Dickens” 150). The implication, it would seem, is that readers turn to Dickens because they are similarly incapable of appreciating more refined modes of art. Today the remark reads as gratuitous and insulting to readers, to Dickens, and to the other cultures Lewes stereotypes as savage. At the same time, the casual nature of the passage also suggests that it reflects commonly held beliefs about primitive life, beliefs we do not have but that Lewes and his readers took for granted. He was clearly safe in assuming such a body of common knowledge, for many other articles in theFortnightly Review(in which Lewes's article appeared in 1872) had similar references to primitivism. Reading through the journal issues of the time, the extent to which anthropological concepts had escaped the covers of books on primitive society and taken up residence in the pages of review essays on contemporary issues – from history, to life in the colonies, to life in Britain itself – is striking. In its print context, the comment about savages and art is less isolated and inexplicable than it is representative of a broad turn to the topic of primitivism in social commentary and analysis during the 1870s.

scholarly journals Irene Baird’s ‘North and South’ in The Climate of Power

2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 283-318
Author(s):  
Joan Sangster
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Canadian Arctic ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
The North ◽  
White Settlers ◽  
North And South ◽  
Political Scene

This article explores the production and publication of The Climate of Power, Irene Baird’s fictionalized account of the post-World War II Ottawa civil service and its interactions with administrators and Indigenous peoples in the Canadian Arctic. While written primarily as a satirical exploration of the Ottawa political scene, particularly the bureaucracy and its policies in the North, the book also reveals much about the gendered nature of the Ottawa bureaucracy, a decidedly masculine space of power. Baird’s experience as an information officer in the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs left her with a rich archive of ideas and impressions about northern development. Her observations are incorporated into the novel as critical social commentary on the ‘contact zones’ of north and south, the colonial space in which unequal encounters between white settlers and Indigenous peoples took place.

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