Why Characters Seem Real: Behavior Descriptions in the Nineteenth-Century Novel

This dissertation explores the relationship between descriptions of social behavior and perceptions of character realism in the nineteenth-century novel. Character realism is a central element of contemporary aesthetic evaluation of fiction, as well as theories of how fictional representation impacts socio-political issues. This association of character realism with aesthetic significance originated with the nineteenth-century novel. However, literary criticism on realism rarely focuses specifically on characterization, and dominant theories of nineteenth-century character realism have tended to associate psychological realism with techniques for the representation of consciousness. This project argues that social behavior descriptions are a major contributing feature of perceived character realism. I engage research from a social psychology field called attribution theory, as well as computational methods, to make this argument. The dissertation consists of a quantitative study of behavior descriptions in the nineteenth-century novel, as well as three case studies on texts and authors associated with distinct forms of character realism: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle.