Hannah, Jessica;
(2022)
Ambivalent Intimacies: Literary character and the ethics of authorial authority in the post-war British novel.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
This thesis considers the work of five novelists in post-war Britain: Iris Murdoch, Brophy, Muriel Spark, Sam Selvon, and Doris Lessing. These writers understood the strength of a novel’s authorial position to be an ethical problem, insofar as it might involve the subordination of multiple voices and perspectives in the interests of one powerful, singular, dominant voice. Each was preoccupied with the dangers of voices too authoritative, and the questionable power of omniscient narration really to be omniscient. These writers used self-conscious, anxious, even megalomaniacal narrators to draw attention to the problem of the authoritative authorial position by parodic means, and sought to give other apparently fragmentary, obscure or minor voices ontological weight. It was this moment in literary history that saw a commitment to double-voicedness become the foremost ethical concern of the novelist. Living and writing in Britain in the 1960s, these writers concurrently developed—with no formal or organised coordination with one another—a set of literary strategies designed to promote alterity and the multiplicity of voices and perspectives in their novels in a manoeuvre that involved the relinquishment of the firm and singular authorial position that they had come to associate with literary modernism. The 1960s ought to be understood as a critically acute moment for innovation in the British novel; one that marks the birth of an insistence on the ethics of eschewing the monolithic and embracing the heterogenous with corresponding literary strategies that insist, correspondingly, on dialogism above monologism.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Ambivalent Intimacies: Literary character and the ethics of authorial authority in the post-war British novel |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2022. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > SHS Faculty Office > UCL Institute for Advanced Studies UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > SHS Faculty Office |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10147416 |
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