In 1905 Lasker's Chess Magazine published a nostalgic reflection on “Charles Dickens as a Chess Player.” Dickens's “old time friend,” Miss Tregear, recalled often playing whist and chess with the competitive novelist: “He was always annoyed when she beat him, and invariably wanted to play another game.” One night, “at midnight,” they reached a draw and Miss Tregear remembers Dickens soliloquizing, “somewhat resignedly,” that the results were just: “Man and woman represent an equation after all. … Intellectual affection is the only lasting love. Love that has a game of chess in it can checkmate any man and solve the problem of life” (12). One “peculiarity” marked Dickens as a chess player: “He always wanted Miss Tregear to play first. He followed all her play and accepted all her variations. ‘It was just so,’ she said, ‘in all his novels. He lets a character lead, and then he simply follows it. … He never created a character’” (12).

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/FB60B724DE57B87D048752FACF621694/S1060150318001559a.pdf/div-class-title-dickens-s-gamers-social-thinking-in-victorian-gaming-and-social-systems-div.pdf

The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel

Dickens's Gamers: Social Thinking in Victorian Gaming and Social Systems

It may seem surprising to begin an essay on Thomas Dixon's 1905 bestseller The Clansman with epigraphs by three female African American authors, contemporaneous with his novel: Anna Julia Cooper, Mrs. N. F. Mosseli, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Surely, many current scholars read the plot of The Clansman as simple and racist4 so much so that the activist work and political writings of African American women should have no context within Dixon's self-proclaimed accounts of the historical enactment of Reconstruction and of "the true story of the 'Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy/"5 Seemingly inspired by the racial paranoia that tormented early twentiethcentury America, the text prides itself upon the narratives of miscegenation and lynching that inspire the textual climax: the alleged rape of Marion Lenoir by former slave, Gus, and the attempted rape of Elsie Stoneman by "mulatto" activist, Silas Lynch. The story finds its redemption when these miscegenous attempts are thwarted by the Ku Klux Klan. As a consequence, the story ends with the triumphant lynching of Gus and ultimately the preservation of southern womanhood. Nonetheless, I begin with these epigraphs because Dixon, as he "preserve[s] in this romance both the letter and the spirit of this remarkable period," seems to engage textually with each.6 Dixon's version of the "chaos of blind passion that followed Lincoln's assassination" is mobilized

"One Important Witness": Remembering Lydia Brown in Thomas Dixon's The Clansman

The Realist Impulse and the Future of Postcoloniality

............................................................................................................................................... 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS ........................................................................................................................... 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ....................................................................................................................... 4 INTRODUCTION THEORIES OF READER CONSTRUCTION OF CHARACTER FROM THE EMPATHY-ALTRUISM HYPOTHESIS TO ‘PSYCHIC INFECTION’ ................................................... 5 CHAPTER ONE: AUTHORITY IN B.S. JOHNSON’S THE UNFORTUNATES, VLADIMIR NABOKOV’S PALE FIRE, AND MARC SAPORTA’S HOPSCOTCH ................................................. 23 CHAPTER TWO: CONTROL IN CORMAC MCCARTHY’S THE ROAD AND THE BIOSHOCK SERIES ...................................................................................................................................................... 67 CHAPTER THREE: MULTIPLICITY IN CORMAC MCCARTHY’S THE ROAD, BIOSHOCK INFINITE, AND IAN MCEWAN’S ENDURING LOVE ...................................................................... 110 CHAPTER FOUR: CAUSALITY IN THE LAST OF US, HEAVY RAIN, AND GEORGE ORWELL’S 1984..................................................................................................................................... 153 CONCLUSION: A THEORY OF IDENTIFICATION AND ETHICS ................................................. 190 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................................. 204

Identification and character : negotiating between inferred authority and reader causality in prose novels and video games

From Marxist criticism to network theory, literary scholarship conceives of social representation in the realist novel as a function of narrative scope. In this reading, novelists illustrate our existence within a social body by forging unexpected narrative connections among seemingly disparate characters, across a wide range of socio-economic classes. My dissertation traces the rise of an alternative form of social representation in the realist novel, the representation of a society through an individual character who is its product. In mid-Victorian realism, character is increasingly figured as a static constellation of predeliberative affects, tendencies, and motives, while narrative, no longer a successful vehicle for an individuals’-eye-view synthesis of events, becomes increasingly fragmentary. My project traces this new formulation of character to the introduction of positivist social empiricism into novelistic practices of representation. The resulting category of positivist literary realism marks a new stage in both technologies of literary representation and cultural interpretation of social scientific epistemology. Although positivism advances a sweeping diachronic narrative of social progress, its empiricist paradigm emphasizes the representative power of self-contained, particular social observations. In the novel, these become observations of character. Per Harriet Martineau, we are to read particular characters as representing the unfolding of general social laws under a particular set of circumstances. But in the fiction of Charles Dickens, John Henry Newman, and George Eliot, treating individual character as self-contained product of social forces ultimately points to the unknowability of the process that shaped that character. John Stuart Mill tries and

The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel

Citations

Dickens's Gamers: Social Thinking in Victorian Gaming and Social Systems

"One Important Witness": Remembering Lydia Brown in Thomas Dixon's The Clansman

The Realist Impulse and the Future of Postcoloniality

Identification and character : negotiating between inferred authority and reader causality in prose novels and video games

Social Science and the Realist Novel’s Turn to Character

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