Abstract According to the classic theory of modernity advanced by Max Weber and adopted by Georg Lukács in his Theory of the Novel, modernity is characterized by disenchantment and the eclipse of meaning. Yet talk about “meaning” in an existential sense is itself a modern phenomenon. Tracing the rise of meaning-talk in the nineteenth century and beyond, this article asks us to consider the possibility that this rise reflects a rise in the availability of meaning, and perhaps even the emergence of meaning as a new concept and value. How might this revisionary model of meaning-and-modernity lead us to alter our understanding of the history and theory of the novel, especially the realist novel? To begin to answer this question, this article compares the quintessential novel of realist disenchantment, George Eliot's Middlemarch, to a contemporaneous novel that serendipitously also features a meaning-seeking protagonist named Dorothea: Old Kensington, by Anne Thackeray Ritchie. Old Kensington is shown to depict the version of modernity suggested by the rise of meaning-talk: a world where meaning, named as such, is not seen as in necessary tension with being, and is recognized as a widely achieved modern value rather than an ideal made unattainable by the forces of secular modernity.
Daniel Hack (Sat,) studied this question.