Andrew H. Miller

The alternate self is a persistent theme of modern culture. From Robert Frost to Sharon Olds, Virginia Woolf to Ian McEwan, poets and novelists--and readers--are fascinated by paths not taken. In an elegant and provocative rumination, Andrew H. Miller lingers with other selves, listening to what they have to say about our stories and our lives.

Tales of Our Unled Lives

On Not Being Someone Else

Literary criticism has, in recent decades, rather fled from discussions of moral psychology, and for good reasons, too. Who would not want to flee the hectoring moralism with which it is so easily associated-portentous, pious, humorless? But in protecting us from such fates, our flight has had its costs, as we have lost the concepts needed to recognize and assess much of what distinguished nineteenth-century British literature. That literature was inescapably ethical in orientation, and to proceed as if it were not ignores a large part of what these texts have to offer, and to that degree makes less reasonable the desire to study them, rather than other documents from the period, or from other periods. Such are the intuitions that drive The Burdens of Perfection, a study of moral perfectionism in nineteenth-century British culture. Reading the period's essayists (Mill, Arnold, Carlyle), poets (Browning and Tennyson), and especially its novelists (Austen, Dickens, Eliot, and James), Andrew H. Miller provides an extensive response to Stanley Cavell's contribution to ethics and philosophy of mind. In the process, Miller offers a fresh way to perceive the Victorians and the lingering traces their quests for improvement have left on readers.

On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

The Burdens of Perfection

Miller Andrew H.

This book examines the relationship between the novel and the emergent commodity culture of Victorian England.

Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative

Novels Behind Glass

An introduction to Victorian sexualities and a survey of current critical methods, these essays emphasize the remarkable variety of Victorian sexuality and the intricate particularity of sexual identities that shaped the way the Victorians thought about themselves. This absorbing collection will energize reflection on the complexity of human sexuality and on the many different arrays of meaning that it has generated.

Andrew H. Miller

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