In its route through three emblematic novels of the extended Victorian era, the following volume brings to light the naked expression of a historical experience at the center of modernity development: the rise of the British Empire in its political, social, and economic dimensions, but also and especially in its ethical and aesthetic dimension, through a exegesis that unravels the perennial battle between good and evil as the driving force of history and culture, in the broadest sense of these two categories. This battle, also understood as a universal historical fact, is fought in the field of the psychological transformations experienced by the literary self, embodied in the character of the literary characters and in the way in which each of them becomes a refraction of a particular way of feeling the influence of the West’s civilizing morality -if that is the right way to put it-. Moreover, the characters in each of these works experience a transition from their corporeality and their desire towards a sensibility that struggles to protect their own being from the civilization influence and to configure their own vision of the world, of beauty, of love and even of heartbreak. Thus, the core and interest of the research provided by Professor Catullo MacIntyre begins by formulating the diagnosis of the moral pathology underlying the Victorian novel in the most characteristic themes and plots of that period to lead to the analysis of the semantic dimension of words and the communicative function of images, as a vehicle for philosophical reasoning, in terms of ethics and aesthetics as already mentioned, but also in terms of an exegetical reconstruction of the knowledge of the human being, its psyche, sexuality, and the limits of its individual freedom. Considering good and evil as abstract categories of the rational or moral order and appealing to the same subjective experience installed in the field of existentialism as a philosophical and literary movement, the study appeals in a relevant and timely manner to tools that, from an interdisciplinary perspective, involve keys of semiological, anthropological, psychological, and psychoanalytical type, integrating in an agile and harmonious way the style and method of literary criticism. But beyond that, the incorporation into the philosophical-literary analysis of the nihilistic principle of Friedrich Nietzsche's “God is dead” is a wise move insofar as it metaphorically evidences the rupture of the foundations of knowledge and morality in Western society: it is the death of the values that until then had given meaning to human experience. But this death should not be understood as a form of irreligiousness or atheism, in the strict sense, but rather as the emergence, after the death of God, of the human artist as a creative being, or alter Deus, who comes to occupy the space left vacant by the disappeared God. With this significant image of the death of God, the traditional understanding of culture as a confirmation of the superior position of the human being is restored, a superiority that clearly resonates in the three novels under the object of study. Also, within this framework, the study explores the emergence of the duality and dualism phenomenon in the literary character that is explained and acquires meaning around English society’s historical, social, and political context during the period in question. The connections between psychological transformation, duality, and nature of the literary character, understood in a generic sense or as a literary “self”, will be decisive, since they refer us to the authors' conceptions of the dualistic personality as a reworking or metaphor of human existence and life in its material transformation. Finally, it should be emphasized that, regarding the work presented below, the figure of the double is the most accurate literary interpretation of the antagonistic essence of the human being in its sensible universe, of its conflicting self-outward and inward. Consciousness, that capacity of man to judge itself and to organize the experience of reality from its own subjectivity is at the origin of the appearance of the double in the nightmares of tormented spirits and in the literary creations that are rehearsed about them. In this scenario the double confronts the remnant of its other self, and from this confrontation the endless cycle of life is nourished.

This book is included in DOAB.