Improbable Realism: Coincidence As Realist Technique From Fielding To Hardy

Abstract

Improbable Realism theorizes the relationship between literary realism and probability, arguing that improbable events such as coincidence frequently facilitate the representational aims of the realist project in the nineteenth century. Uniting historicist and formalist approaches to the novel, this dissertation examines how four important authors in the realist canon-Fielding, Scott, Dickens, and Hardy-harness coincidence as a narrative mechanism in their representation of particular social milieus. As statistically unlikely encounters that defy the reader's expectations of the everyday, coincidences have long been regarded by critics as antagonistic to realism. This critical disdain for coincidence, however, is unwarranted because it too readily applies Aristotelian aesthetic principles to narratives that work in fundamentally different ways from those Aristotle analyzes. Aristotle's exclusion of improbable events from well-constructed plots is grounded in his philosophical idea that accidental events are beyond knowledge, yet in modernity such events became important sites for the production of knowledge about life in the world. This importance is illustrated in the way that many early novels in the eighteenth century use coincidental events to think through problems of agency. Improbable Realism demonstrates that coincidence became an important narrative device for nineteenthcentury authors because improbable encounters generate opportunities for novels to represent complex relationships between the social base and individual agency. Chapter One uses Fielding's Tom Jones as a test case for examining the historical and theoretical issues surrounding coincidence, arguing that the narrator's rhetorical framing of coincidental events marks an important contribution to the emergence of the realist mode. Through readings of "The Two Drovers," Redgauntlet, and The Bride of Lammermoor, Chapter Two demonstrates that Scott frequently harnessed the competing interpretations that coincidences elicit in his representation of historical particularity. Chapter Three considers Dickens's treatment of coincidence, arguing that it enables him in Martin Chuzzlewit to represent and historicize selfishness as a product of the increasingly mediated nature of Victorian social relations. Chapter Four analyzes the importance of coincidence to the form of Hardy's novels, linking its function to Hardy's historicist habit of mind through readings of A Pair of Blue Eyes and The Return of the Native.