This thesis aims to argue that the child’s perspective elicits sympathy, empathy, and humor in order to evoke moral criticism in Henry James’ What Maisie Knew and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird...Show moreThis thesis aims to argue that the child’s perspective elicits sympathy, empathy, and humor in order to evoke moral criticism in Henry James’ What Maisie Knew and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter focusses on how the young girl’s perspective evokes moral criticism through sympathy in James’ Maisie. Through a close reading of the novel, this section argues that the child’s point of view brings forth sympathy through a representation of the protagonist’s beleaguered benevolence and that this feeling, in turn, is amplified by the young girl’s growing awareness. In contrast, chapter two provides an analysis of the moral criticism induced as a result of the reader’s empathy with Scout in Mockingbird. The segment displays how the child’s perspective invites the reader to empathize with the young protagonist. Furthermore, it presents how Scout’s moral development highlights the amorality of the Maycomb community. The final chapter contains an exploration of the satirical sense in both James’ Maisie and Lee’s Mockingbird. The chapter analyzes how the young girl’s perspective elicits irony and thereby criticism of characters in the novels.Show less
The art of sympathy constitutes an essential element in George Eliot’s concept of authorship. Regarding her novel The Mill on the Floss (1860), this thesis examines the function of imagination and...Show moreThe art of sympathy constitutes an essential element in George Eliot’s concept of authorship. Regarding her novel The Mill on the Floss (1860), this thesis examines the function of imagination and how George Eliot seeks to develop this function within the realm of the realist novel. The thesis starts with describing Eliot's view on the art of sympathy influenced by e.g. Feuerbach's concept of double-consciousness and Hazlitt’s discussion of Shakespearean sympathy and how she thinks it should be applied to the realist novel. A second section proposes a new reading of The Mill on the Floss based on one of Bakhtin’s theories, as explicated in his essay Discourse in the Novel (1975). This is done to distinguish the narrator's voice from George Eliot's own voice and to examine what Eliot implies with the narrator’s different shifts (and inconsistencies). The next two sections present the narrator and the difficulties he has when telling the story of Maggie Tulliver. First, the thesis discusses the difficulty the narrator is faced with when he discovers that Maggie's characteristics and circumstances go beyond his scientific comprehension of life. Second, the thesis illustrates that when seeking the audience's sympathy for his character Maggie, the narrator is confronted with the inaptness of the contemporary literary conventions to do so. These last two sections give insights on how Eliot both explores and expresses the limits of its omniscient narrator’s knowledge and style, and experiments with how she can replace it with the ‘art of sympathy’.Show less
