Knowledge and Mortality

Aristotle identifies -the transformation from ignorance to knowledge, - or "anagnorisis" as crucial to dramatic tension. Using the Biblical -garden- as the "locus classicus" of "anagnorisis" in Western narrative fiction, this study establishes the connection between knowledge and mortality in Genesis, and analyzes "anagnorisis" and mortality in three nineteenth-century British novels, "Middlemarch, Tess of the d'Urbervilles" and "Pride and Prejudice," and in the -postmodern- novel "Possession." Ultimately, it is a proof that the suffusing literary motif of -knowledge and mortality- is inescapable: it transcends fictional genre and period because the -knowledge of mortality- is humanity's most ontologically disturbing burden."