Gallagher, Catherine.
“The Tailor Unraveled: The Unaccountable ‘I’ in Kingsley’s
Alton Locke: Tailor
and Poet” in The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction:
Social Discourse and Narrative Form 1832-1867 (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1985): 88-110.
Gallagher argues that Kingsley often displays contradictory opinions on free
will in his writings. For example, Alton Locke , stressing the complexity
of the issue of freedom, reveals more ambivalence about causality than any
other industrial novel. "For Kingsley chose a form that expressed his Romantic
faith in a free will benevolently reconciled with God-given circumstances;
however, his reforming purpose led him to add incongruous elements, suggestions
of negative environmental determinism, to that form. The resulting contradiction
is neither avoided nor suppressed nor resolved in the narrative, for Kingsley’s
form encourages the narrator to review the free will/determinism controversy
obsessively throughout the book” (89).
Alton Locke
;
Free Will
. |
