| dc.contributor.author | Judge, Elizabeth F. | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2014-10-21T12:37:49Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2004 | |
| dc.date.issued | 2004 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.other | AAINQ94029 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10222/54642 | |
| dc.description | This thesis considers the history of the English novel as part of the history of credibility and testimony. Over the long eighteenth century, it was a commonplace of moral philosophy and jurisprudence that testimony should be evaluated based on both the plausibility of the subject matter and the credibility of the speaker. The origins of the English novel have been ably examined with respect to plausibility (factual probability). This thesis develops the idea that credibility and the novel are also intimately connected and argues that eighteenth-century literary credibility practices, developed from philosophy and law, informed how novels were read and characters were interpreted. In the eighteenth century, readers were expected to see and hear testimony in the novel, to interpret testimony as having visual and aural sensory evidence, and to use that evidence to interpret credibility, and judge from there which characters, and what parts of what they said, could be believed. The thesis examines the historically conditioned protocols and devices institutionalized by the novel for testing the epistemic and moral traits of credibility and the underlying epistemological theories for how credibility should be tested; and, it advances a testimonial paradigm, which calls attention to the presence of testimony and credibility protocols in the eighteenth-century novel. | en_US |
| dc.description | Credibility, or the quality of deserving to have one's testimony believed, figures prominently in eighteenth-century philosophy, law, and literature, with each inquiry adding to its history. Seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century philosophy developed principles for probabilistic inferences about credibility based especially on visual evidence of the speaker's body that was elicited during the act of testifying. The English legal contribution to credibility included differentiating credibility and character, extending what can be known about credibility when little was known about character, and formalizing protocols and heightening consciousness of the ordinary practice of testimony appraisal. The novel's contribution was to model and refine forensic credibility procedures and apply them to ordinary decision-making involving conjectures about future facts. Readers' and jurors' epistemological and hermeneutic environments newly converged in the eighteenth century, when both faced the difficult interpretive task of evaluating people from only the localized evidence of particular testimony, rather than from personal familiarity with people's character or knowledge of their reputation acquired over time. | en_US |
| dc.description | In order that readers (and characters) could know when to believe what characters said, eighteenth-century novelists incorporated credibility indicia and included procedures by which readers could actively test credibility for themselves. Readers were expected to bring credibility acumen with them but also had those skills honed through the act of reading novels. The eighteenth-century novel represented characters testing other characters' credibility by observing them in the act of testifying. Novels therefore were pedagogical devices that instructed readers how to manage the subjectivity and discretion of credibility practices by modelling credibility interpretation and by incorporating acts of credibility judgment. Eighteenth-century novels taught how to acquire information from other people (through testimony) when there was imperfect information about other people (by evaluating credibility). | en_US |
| dc.description | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 2004. | en_US |
| dc.language | eng | en_US |
| dc.publisher | Dalhousie University | en_US |
| dc.publisher | | en_US |
| dc.subject | Literature, English. | en_US |
| dc.title | Character witnesses: Credibility and testimony in the eighteenth-century English novel. | en_US |
| dc.type | text | en_US |
| dc.contributor.degree | Ph.D. | en_US |
