Comparative Literature Commons^™

“La Storia Mia È Breve”: Reading Puccini’S La Bohème Beyond The Obvious, Parkorn Wangpaiboonkit

Honors Papers

A comparative close reading of Puccini's La Bohème, creating alternative readings through exploring the opera's hidden meanings, resistance to genre conventions, and innovations.

Review Of Spanish New York Narratives 1898–1936: Modernization, Otherness And Nation, By David Miranda-Barreiro, Iker González-Allende

Spanish Language and Literature Papers

This book analyzes the representation of New York City in the Spanish narrative during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Miranda-Barreiro argues that New York emerges in this literature as a symbol of modernity, as an image of Otherness and a threat to Spanish values and society. The author connects this reaction with the crisis of Spanish national identity triggered by the end of the Empire in 1898, but he also points out that the Spanish case was not isolated, since European texts show similar anxieties about US modernization. One positive aspect of the book is the study …

Delno C. West Award Winner (2015)

Quidditas

Elizabeth Dolly Weber

The West Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a senior scholar at the annual conference.

Audacious Translation: On Being Haunted And Getting Lost On The Way To Translating Spivak. A Reflection On Spivak’S “Translating Into English”, Susan R. Adams

Scholarship and Professional Work – Education

In “Translating Into English” within An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012), Spivak eludes apprehension, spurns comprehension, and resists neat translation as I, an American educator, attempt to make sense of what is meant by an aesthetic education as Spivak translates the act of translation. Caught and othered as a language broker in learning the double bind of translation, I find no answers, only new questions as I grope toward ways to conceptualize and to name this moment for translators and language educators: (1) What does it mean to be a translator?; (2) Can and should the convenient …

Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, 1800, Jason N. Goldsmith

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Prelude:

IN the dense tracts of woodland that stretch south from Esthwaite Water, a young boy pauses amidst a copse of hazel. His chest heaves; his heart races. Brake, bramble, and thorn. Exhaustion and expectation gather in each breath, course through his body and deeper still into his soul. He eyes the trees, fingers the milk-white flowers that hang in clusters, and knows joy. His breathing slows. Leaves murmur in the breeze. His heart fills with kindness. Taking up the crook that lies in the long grass, he swings it wide. Petals fill the air, swirl around him like …

Comunicación No Verbal: La Banda Sonora De Arroz Y Tartana, Linda M. Willem

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Arroz y tartana, escrita en 1894, ejemplifica las consecuencias graves de abandonar los valores burgueses de trabajo y economía para guardar apariencias con excesos de gasto y consumo. El director José Antonio Escrivá llevó la obra a la pantalla en el año 2003, y Enric Murillo compuso la música original. Los temas, coordinados con las imágenes y el diálogo, constituyen un lenguaje no verbal para comunicarle información al espectador. Funcionando en conjunto dentro del sistema de leitmotifs, los temas establecen una red de asociaciones que informa y expresa la filosofía moral de la narración.

Female Representations In Contemporary Postmodern War Novels Of Spain And The United States: Women As Tools Of Modern Catharsis In The Works Of Javier Cercas And Tim O'Brien, Joseph P. Weil

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, the notion of women being used as tools of modern catharsis is explored through the comparative analysis of the Spanish novel Soldiers of Salamis (2001) by Javier Cercas, and the American novel The Things They Carried (1990) by Tim O’Brien. The two novels, separated by linguistic and national traditions, and personal choices by each author, will both be evaluated for their unique postmodern treatments of war, memory, and verisimilitude. Expanding from this base and through an application of feminist theory, the female representations—which are partly crafted by an unconscious masculine language—will be deconstructed for their intended and …

Wreath-Laying In Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey 17 July 2014, Beryl Gray

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Every one of us attending this ceremony in Poets' Corner today is surely conscious of a great debt of gratitude to George Eliot for the legacy of her works. This year, partly due to the appearance of Rebecca Mead's memoir, one particular work - Middlemarch - has been the focus of much attention; and of all George Eliot's books it's the existence of Middlemarch for which I am myself most grateful. It's therefore on that work that I shall be focusing today.

For many decades it has been generally accepted that Middlemarch is George Eliot's greatest novel.' The writer Julian …

The George Eliot Review: Journal Of The George Eliot Fellowship- 2015 No. 46, Beryl Gray, John Rignall, Michael Davis

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

CONTENTS

Notes on Contributors ............................................................. .5

ARTICLES Jen Davis: Silas Marner: George Eliot's most Coleridgean Work? (Prize Essay)........................... 8

Barbara Hardy: Elizabeth Gaskell in Middlemarch: Timothy Cooper, the Judgement of Solomon, and the Woman at the Window................................. .16

Marianne Burton: How Much did Dorothea and Celia Know? Sexual Ignorance and Knowledge among Unmarried Girls in Middlemarch ........................................ 21

Kate Osborne: Mr Brooke's Thinking Organ...................................................... 29

John Rignall: Middlemarch and the Franco-Prussian War ............................... 38

Rodney Edgecombe: Felix Holt and the Gusset of Futurity ...............................46

Rosemary J. Burges Woods: A Life Reclaimed: George Evans (1766-1857) of Norbury, Winster, Derby and Belper …

Chairman's Annual Report For 2014, John Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

No wonder we all felt exhausted by December! In preparing this report I have realized what an extraordinary number of things the Fellowship did last year; certainly the biggest workload since I became chairman but, one hopes, a year which brought new insights and pleasures to members and non-members we attract to our events.

Our normal pattern of meetings took place but was supplemented by several other large-scale events. Thus the AGM in March, which included the routine election of officers and council members, was enclosed by two much more exciting events. In February we had a full house at …

Elizabeth Gaskell In Middlemarch: Timothy Cooper, The Judgement Of Solomon, And The Woman At The Window, Barbara Hardy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" Gaskell and Harriet Martineau were the only living novelists George Eliot praised, and very briefly. George Eliot and Gaskell never met but corresponded, admired each other's work, and in several books George Eliot unconsciously drew on details and characters from Gaskell novels.3 There are three important details in Middlemarch - which Gaskell never read because she died before its publication - deriving from Cousin Phillis, Wives and Daughters, and North and South.

Chapter 56 of Middlemarch is a meeting-point for history and the personal life. Caleb Garth's social confidence rings loud as he speaks …

Note: Alcharisi And The Redundant Definite Article, John Rignall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In critical and scholarly writing about Daniel Deronda, Daniel's mother, the Princess Leonora Halm-Eberstein, is all too often referred to as 'the Alcharisi'. In fact, the definite article is only used on one occasion in conjunction with her former stage name, when she tells Daniel that 'I was the Alcharisi you have heard of' (Ch. 51). The definite article simply specifies the particular Alcharisi she was. This is like, for instance, Maria Callas saying to someone on a first meeting 'I am the Callas you have heard of’. Just as this would not license anyone to refer to her thereafter …

A Life Reclaimed: George Evans (1766-1857) Of Norbury, Winster, Derby And Belper, Rosemary J. Burges Wood

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Evans, the elder brother of Robert Evans, George Eliot's father, has generally been disparaged as a drunkard who died young, but the following account of further research into his life aims to set the record straight. What is known for certain is that he died on 28 October 1857 at his daughter's house in Swinney Lane, Belper, Derbyshire, and was buried in the Churchyard of St Peter's Parish Church at Belper. He was 90 years of age. On the death certificate his occupation is given as 'A shoemaker at Derby (Master),

The immediate descendants of his daughter, Elizabeth, knew …

Middlemarch And The Franco-Prussian War, John Rignall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

By the early summer of 1870, George Eliot's work on Middlemarch, then consisting of the Vincy, Lydgate and Featherstone material, seemed to have stalled. In a journal entry of 20 May, George Eliot confessed that she was not hopeful about future work: 'I am languid, and my novel languishes to O'.1 And in fact the last references to Middlemarch in her journal date back to the previous September: on 11 September she had reached page 50 and the end of chapter 3, and then on the 22nd she maintained that she was stuck: 'im Stiche gerathen' (Journals, 138). There followed …

Review Of George Eliot, Poetess, Wendy S. Williams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The word 'poetess' is contentious. For some it rankles, because the diminution of 'poet' is generally considered gratuitous, patronizing and offensive. More often than not, it belittles women writers and their work. Others, however, argue that it is a useful word with which to describe poets belonging to the 'poetess tradition'. That particular tradition demands our attention, they argue, and requires detailed study. In 2003, Peggy Davis wrote that such work had only just begun but more biographical research was needed 'to establish a more prominent place for the poetess in particular and, more generally, women's poetry in literary criticism …

Review Of George Eliot's Feminism: 'The Right To Rebellion', June Skye Szirotny

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This luminous new work - dedicated to 'the millions of women deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by society's misogynist myths' - casts fresh light on George Eliot's feminism, which has often been the subject of controversy. 'I want to show' , says the author, 'that however ambivalent George Eliot was about practical matters, she strongly accepted most of the ideals of contemporary feminists […]. [S]he moves, through her works, from a repudiation of rebellion against conventional views of women to an acceptance of that rebellion in her later works; and, in each of her major works, …

Review Of Sophie And The Sibyl: A Victorian Romance, Patricia Duncker

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot's afterlife in adaptations of and sequels to her works is thin compared to those of such contemporaries as Dickens and the Brontes, and similarly the number of novels in which she appears as a character is meagre. True, as early as 1881 the characterization of Theresa in The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford was inspired by the friendship of its author, William Hale White, with Marian Evans in the 1850s, when both lived in publisher John Chapman's house at 142 Strand. Theresa is an idealized character, but recall White's corrective to George Eliot's Life ... by her husband 1. …

Silas Marner: George Eliot's Most Coleridgean Work?, Jen Davis

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In 1861 Henry Crabb Robinson compared George Eliot's Silas Mamer with Coleridge's 'The Ancient Mariner'. He noted the novel's 'great affinity' with the poem: 'A little child, its mother having frozen to death at his solitary hovel, is taken in by Silas [ ...]. It is to him what the blessing of the animals is to the Ancient Mariner.' 1 In 1977, U. C. Knoepflmacher argued that: '[b]oth The Mill on the Floss and Silas Mamer hark back to those poems of severance, loss, and expiation that had haunted the imaginations of Coleridge and Wordsworth at the turn of the …

Review Of Silas Marner. Read By Anna Bentinck. Naxos Complete Classics, Michael Slater

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Audiofile praises the 'pleasant cadence' of Anna Bentinck's voice in this recording of George Eliot's Wordsworthian masterpiece but, initially at least, I found her reading with its beautiful elocution sounded a bit too like Mrs. Miniver (contrast Eileen Atkins's sensitive reading of The Mill on The Floss for Cover to Cover). The pace, moreover, is generally rather slow and becomes slower still when Bentinck comes to voice rural speakers like Jem Bryce or the company at the Rainbow Inn, and almost unbearably slow in the case of Snell the landlord (the exception is Dowlas, the quarrelsome farrier, for whom she …

Review Of The Dog In The Dickensian Imagination, Beryl Gray

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The nineteenth century saw great changes in the way the English thought about animals. This wasn't only because of Darwinian revelations; it was also the result of increased urbanization and industrialization. Less frequently confined to the farmyard or the hunting kennels the dog, in particular, entered the daily life of humans as never before. It became a domestic pet, a fellow worker, the object of scientific enquiry; in today's accepted phrase, it became a member of 'a companion species', deserving understanding and concern. Dorothea Brooke, we might recall, was 'always attentive to the feelings of dogs, and very polite if …