Character and Consciousness

 Copyright: 2005.  ISBN: 1-930901-91-7.  281 pages.  Price: $74.95

 The qualitative narrative bibliographical review of scholarly work on English literature by The English Association (UK – and published by Oxford UP), The Year’s Work in English Studies, reviewed C&C in 2007 (volume 86 (1) section XIV, pages 780-886) and said, in brief:

“Tague is able to demonstrate [. . .] an evolution of increasing complexity in the manner in which novelists consider the place of the individual within the environment, the nature of this environment, and the criteria for refining a consciousness of oneself and the world that leads to ethical attitudes and behaviour” (789).

From the Publisher:

This scholarly monograph investigates and discusses the concepts of character and consciousness through an interdisciplinary reading relying primarily on philosophical concepts and discourse providing a genealogy of the notion of character from Victorian novelists to the notion of consciousness in modern writers. The author applies philosophical approaches (such as the metaphysics of Schopenhauer, the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, and the hermeneutics of Gadamer) to major British authors to examine not one but various levels of consciousness, from bodily, through metaphysical, to ethical. This work is a direct contribution to the nascent field of consciousness studies as it offers a new definition of consciousness for literary criticism in a philosophical and not a psychological way. The research will also contribute to the intellectual history of 19th and 20th century English literature. Fine research and worthy of being studied along with Robert Langbaum and Daniel Schneider in the quest for the notion of character not just as a given but also as a theoretical construct that unfolds into the idea of consciousness.

From the Foreword by Dr. Eleanor Green:

Tague’s use of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and more contemporary literary criticism to explore the depiction of character and consciousness in these four authors makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of the novelists’ conception of the individuals they have created and the environments in which these individuals live.  Beyond throwing light on four pivotal writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Tague has provided a method for examining and understanding other novelists.  His examination of the evolution of the understanding of character and consciousness and a chronologically evolving new sense of what constitutes ethical behavior provides a valuable framework for exploring all writing of this important period in English literature.

From the Author’s Preface:

My effort to devise a polar duality called character and consciousness is not because such an idea of duality is essentially new (maybe it is) but because the application of such to literary texts is useful.  We have consciousness so that we can understand character.  That may seem obvious, but it is not: many thinkers, leaving the terms vague and undefined, conflate consciousness with character, separate them, or reduce consciousness to a device, rather than grasping the terms as realities communicating in a polar relationship.

From the Author’s Finis:

As we are thinking and feeling beings, so do writers respond to our lives, with favor to feeling.  The world exists indirectly, in relation to (as a consequence of) one’s consciousness, which itself depends on internal character . . . .  By exploring the seed words character and consciousness we have demonstrated how the novelist distinguishes thinking and feeling among individuals, with emphasis on the subjectivity of not just cognition but emotion.