Fielding's "Mixed" Characters: Probability, Particularity, and the Sagacious Reader

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2017-08
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"My argument focuses on how specific philosophical changes during the middle of the century initiated a change in reading strategy that eventually produced the capacity to understand complex characters and contributed to the construction of a hierarchy of readers within an imagined reading community. I suggest that Fielding's literary agenda are steeped in an emerging concept of causality and probability that forced him to reject "types," or exemplars of moral behaviour, and to adopt more complex or "mixed" characters, to borrow from Samuel Johnson, I argue that it was in Fielding's attempt to instruct his readers in how to use probabilistic thinking to understand characters that initiated the formation of a category of "ideal" readers that therefore both constructed a hierarchy of "good" readers and began to question the benefits and dangers of a subjective understanding of character." -- page 3.
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Thesis ( M.A.) Indiana University South Bend, 2017
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