Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Arguably the most important single influence on early to mid-Victorian aspirations for the cultural status of the novelist can be located in the work of a writer who, notoriously, had little time for ‘fiction’. In Thomas Carlyle's celebrated lecture series on the historical forms of heroism and hero-worship, the penultimate lecture, delivered in May 1840, focused on ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’, a case which he presented as the symptomatically modern manifestation of the heroic type. Carlyle's chosen exempla for this lecture were three eighteenth-century writers – Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Johnson, and Robert Burns – whose literary production encompassed the novel, but who were not chosen on this, or any other narrowly generic, ground. (The same could be said of Goethe, for Carlyle a more complete model of the literary hero, who is briefly considered as a possible subject for the lecture at its outset.) The category of the ‘man of letters’, then, designates a generically indeterminate identity for the modern (male) author, albeit one that Carlyle distinguishes from the putatively older manifestation of the ‘hero as poet’ (the subject of the third lecture in the series). What characterizes the modernity of the ‘man of letters’ is, rather, his association with the medium of writing and the technology of printing, as opposed to the ‘oral’ medium of earlier forms of heroism. Carlyle, ... log in or subscribe to read full text