My dissertation explores nineteenth-century British authors’ views of the moral and educational function of literature, focusing specifically on how William Wordsworth, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy addressed in literary forms the issues of sympathy and reading raised in the eighteenth century. In addition to making a similar claim about sympathy and reading—a central function of literature is to extend the readers’ capacities for sympathy through reading experience—all these authors attach major importance to rural life as subject matter in their sympathetic education of readers. By considering these authors’ representations of sympathetic relations in rural settings in relation to eighteenth-century thoughts on sympathy and reading, this dissertation aims to reach a more balanced and productive understanding of their “didactic” attempts to teach strategies of sympathy to readers.
With the advent of liberalism and the emergence of the concept of a modern individual, the eighteenth century witnessed an enormous preoccupation with the issues of self-representation and sympathetic imagination, bringing up the idea that sympathy is not an immediate identification but only an imagined representation. The complicated epistemological and ethical questions about a sympathetic experience raised by eighteenth-century thinkers shed light on the approaches that Wordsworth, Eliot, and Hardy take to their sympathetic education of readers: by preventing their readers from indulging in superficial and painless feelings of sympathy, these authors seek to make readers conscious of the problems of the improper use of sympathetic imagination. In order to illustrate the specific methods that Wordsworth, Eliot, and Hardy employ to expand readers’ sympathetic minds, I focus on how they problematize the commonly accepted notions of sympathy through their representations of rural life or rural people. As the individual chapters of my dissertation show, each author wrote in different historical contexts and had different amounts of faith in the possibility of restoring the foundations of morality upon which meaningful human relations can be built. Nevertheless, all three authors continued in their efforts to interrogate the moral and educational possibilities of literature.