Character and Consciousness: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence (phenomenological, Ecological and Ethical Readings)

This scholarly monograph investigates and discusses the concepts of character and consciousness through an interdisciplinary reading relying primarily on philosophical concepts and discourse providing a genealogy of the notion of character from Victorian novelists to the notion of consciousness in modern writers. The author applies philosophical approaches(such as the metaphysics of Schopenhauer, the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, and the hermeneutics of Gadamer) to major British authors to examine not one but various levels of consciousness, from bodily, through metaphysical, to ethical. This work is a direct contribution to the nascent field of consciousness studies as it offers a new definition of consciousness for literary criticism in a philosophical and not psychological way. The research will also contribute to the intellectual history of 19th and 20th century English literature.