The Burdens of Perfection

A study of moral perfectionism in nineteenth-century British culture, this book reads a wide range of essayists, poets, and novelists through the lens of ethics and philosophy of mind.

Andrew H. Miller is Professor of English and Director of the Victorian Studies Program at Indiana University and Editor of Victorian Studies. He is the author of Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative.

One of the best books on Victorian writing to have appeared in the last ten years.

Andrew H. Miller makes the compelling, persuasive argument that the moral perfectionism so deeply embedded in nineteenth-century writing, particularly in Victorian fiction, represents not a position adopted by some writers and rejected by others but rather 'a field on which writers arrayed themselves.'.

Stanley Cavell, Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, Emeritus, Harvard University:

The passion and the learning throughout Andrew H. Miller's marvelous book constitute a brace of virtues much admired by the Victorians he justly admires. The demonstration that the transcendent novels of the Victorian period precisely confront skepticism with respect to the minds of others serves as a standing rebuke to theories of knowledge in the bulk of what became university philosophy.

Regenia Gagnier, University of Exeter:

In his practice of moral reflection, Andrew H. Miller explicitly reveals what has often been thought but not so well expressed, that literary criticism has returned to ethics. Miller charts this return through philosophers who have not been so visible in our climate of new historicism—Stanley Cavell, Stuart Hampshire, Bernard Williams—and novelists and essayists who have. The results are agitating, like moral improvement.

Garrett Stewart, James O. Freedman Professor of Letters, University of Iowa:

Andrew H. Miller's book can't help but seem path-clearing. The Burdens of Perfection is as fresh as it is learned; original in its conception, structure, and emphasis; and notable for the gait and responsiveness of its lucid, meditative prose. Miller's scholarship is seasoned and searching, both assured and bravely speculative, with the readings of fiction often elating in the compressed rightness of their surprise and the exemplarity of their selection.

James Eli Adams, Cornell University:

The Burdens of Perfection is one of those very rare books that stimulates me to rethink almost everything I know about Victorian literature, and a good deal beyond. In analyzing the nineteenth-century preoccupation with perfectionism, Andrew H. Miller offers a rich, brilliant study of the ethical allure of narration—our appeal to narrative as a means of understanding ourselves, our relations to other people, and what we might become. As he explores the burdens of perfection, Miller offers compelling insights into a broad range of contemporary literary and philosophical reflection, and develops a remarkable and distinctive critical voice of his own.