Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Prefacing Texts, Authorizing Authors, And Constructing Selves: The Preface As Autobiographical Space, Julie A. Eckerle

English Publications

The preface is a unique textual space, one that demands very particular kind of rhetoric because of its generic constraints and yet allows ample room for an author's manipulation and creativity. Perhaps the best articulation of the prefaces paradoxical nature appears in Barbara Johnson's playful response to Jacques Derrida's Dissemination. The autobiographical details summarized here paradoxically depict Speght as the heroic defender of all people and, simultaneously, a woman who clearly knows her place. In her work on French Renaissance women writers, Anne R. Larsen reveals the value of this kind of study: Early women writers exploited the prefaces marginality …

Rebels From The Waist Down: An Exploration Of Sex And Love In 1984, Charles R. Vaught Jr.

2016 Symposium

In 1984, George Orwell depicts a dystopian vision of London. The novel, published in 1949, is a depressing and unhopeful look at the future. However, at its core 1984 is much more than just a futuristic science fiction tale, it is a sexually tragic love story. Throughout the novel, Orwell represents sexuality in this dystopian society as something that has to be suppressed and ultimately warped into a forced love for Big Brother. The very act of sex for fun is viewed as an act of revolt, and those who participate in it are depicted as insurgents. This distorted …

“Do No Harm”: An Exploration Of Medicine In William Shakespeare’S Writings And Modern Filmic Adaptations, Nicholas A. Shortreed

Conspectus Borealis

No abstract provided.

All Is Not Fair In Love And Shakespearean Comedy, Shelby Nguyen

Conspectus Borealis

No abstract provided.

The Imperial Graft: Horticulture, Hybridity, And The Art Of Mingling Races In Henry V And Cymbeline, Jean Feerick

English

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment brings together 42 of the most important scholars and writing on the subject today. Extending the purview of feminist criticism, it offers an intersectional paradigm for considering representations of gender in the context of race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and religion. In addition to sophisticated textual analysis drawing on the methods of historicism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and posthumanism, a team of international experts discuss Shakespeare's life, contemporary editing practices, and performance of his plays on stage, on screen, and in the classroom. This theoretically sophisticated yet elegantly written Handbook includes an editor's Introduction that …

The Coventry Mysteries And Shakespeare's Histories, Clifford Davidson

Early Drama, Art, and Music

This study is a revision of a paper read at the Shakespeare Institute at Wheaton College and subsequently published in Shakespeare's Second Tetralogy: Some Christian Features, edited by Beatrice Batson (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 1989), 3-25.

Remembering Barbara Hardy, Beryl Gray

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I don't compare my intellectual capacity with Lydgate's, but I do remember the precise moment when I knew that the study and potentially the teaching of 'English' were absolutely what I wanted to commit myself to for the rest of my working life, an already distinctly 'mature' student though I was. That moment occurred during my first year at Birkbeck, when Barbara was lecturing on Samuel Richardson's vast epistolary work of fiction, Clarissa, and showing how Clarissa's syntax is one of the ways in which the nature of her intelligence is distinguished from that of every other character in the …

In Memoriam, Bill Adams (1923-2016), John Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

With the passing of Bill Adams at the age of 92 we have truly reached the end of an era. Bill had a close association with the George Eliot Fellowship for fifty years and only two days before his death on 21 June he had laid a wreath ih Nuneaton, as the Fellowship's guest of honour, and after his speech enjoyed chatting at the museum tea room with guests and members, some of whom he had known for decades.

Barbara Hardy (1924-2016), Isobel Armstrong

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This will be a very personal obituary because in losing Barbara I lost one of the profoundest friendships of my life. Her demanding intellectual boldness and buoyant strength of mind were immediately striking. But she also had a capacity for warmth and joy and enthusiasm, a warmth that was evident in the home environment she created: to enter her Earl's Court flat was like entering a Matisse painting - full of colour, oriental carpets, bowls and pots, and paintings by her daughter, Kate. I was lucky enough to experience that warmth and energy less than a week before she died, …

In Janet Dempster's Footsteps: Reminiscence, David Harper

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The road from Trent Valley Station down towards the town centre curves gently past the row of horse-chestnuts in Bond Gate with their white candles. To the young boy arriving to take up residence in Nuneaton it promised something new, always interesting, always just out of reach.

From my earliest years I was a keen reader and felt the privilege of our local author's being one of the unquestioned greats; but it was George Eliot's north Warwickshire that initially attracted me, with The Mill on the Floss and Si/as Marner my favourites. This was reinforced by cycling the lanes for …

'Woman's Freedom Lies In Choosing The Husband Who Is To Be Her Master': Existentialism And The Female Slave In Daniel Deronda, Marianne Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Various commentators have suggested that Daniel Deronda can be read as a text which espouses early existentialist principles, elevating the individual's search for personal truths above society's expectations and conceptions of duty. I am going to suggest that Deronda 's proto-existentialism is of particular interest when viewed as poised between nineteenth- and twentieth-century formulations of existentialism, the godly and the godless, and when Deronda's search is compared with the narratives of the female characters whose freedoms are more curtailed by social mores.

Riding Horses In Middlemarch, Beryl Gary

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

'George Eliot's Peculiar Passion' i the title of an article by Sarah Wintle, refers to the belief expressed by Katherine Mansfield in a letter to her husband, John Middleton Murry, that George Eliot had a 'peculiar passion for horses'. At the beginning of the article, Wintle quotes the part of Mansfield's letter which asks Murry to

think of some of [George Eliot's] pictures of country life - the breadth - the sense of sun lying on warm barns - great warm kitchens at twilight when the men came home from the fields - the feeling of beasts horses and cows …

A Tribute To Barbara Hardy, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Barbara and I were close friends for over fifty years. She was the external examiner for my doctoral thesis in 1962, and from then on we met three or four times a year. I had previously reviewed The Novels of George Eliot and been impressed by the subtlety of the sustained investigation and the freshness of approach. It would be accurate to say that it was the major influence on my own studies in Victorian literature.

Notes On Contributors

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Isobel Armstrong--John Burton--Marianne Burton--Delia da Sousa Correa--Patricia Duncker--Beryl Gray--Anna Gutowska--David Halliwell--Graham Handley--David Harper--Margaret Harris--Alain Jumeau--George Levine--Tapan Kumar Mukherjee--David Paterson--John Rignall--Eri Satoh--Michael Slater

Barbara Hardy: Recollections, Margaret Harris

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The last time I saw Barbara Hardy was in November 2014, at the Middlemarch day held at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Senate House, London, when she gave a characteristically rich paper on Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot.' She had turned ninety that June, and while she was physically diminished and the voice less bell-like, her intonations and gestures were as ever, and her responses to questions as sharp.

George Eliot's Afterlife: Dinitia Smith's The Honeymoon And Diana Souhami's Gwendolen, Margaret Harris

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In Middlemarch, chapter 20, as Dorothea Casubon sits musing in Rome, George Eliot presents one of the most traumatic honeymoons in fiction . With decorum, but unmistakably, Dorothea's sexual confusion is conveyed: however, she will live through widowhood to fulfilment as Dorothea Ladislaw. In contrast, George Eliot denies such fulfilment to Gwendolen Grandcourt in her next novel, Daniel Deronda. Where Dorothea's acceptance of Casaubon's proposal arises from idealistic ignorance, Gwendolen's decision to marry Grandcourt is morally flawed because of her awareness of his liaison with Lydia Glasher. There is no question about the physical consummation of the Grandcourt marriage, unlike …

Opera Review: Middlemarch In Spring, A Two-Act Opera By Composer Alien Shearer, Libretto By Claudia Stevens. First Performance, San Francisco, Z Space, March 19, 2015, Delia Da Sousa Correa, Michael Halliwell

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot consistently paid meticulous attention to matters of 'voice,' typically providing precise descriptions of her characters' voices, whether speaking or singing. Dorothea Brooke's harp-like voice is, of course, one of the qualities that first transfixes Will Ladislaw. Eliot's novels also resound with allusions to the operatic repertoire, from Caterina Sarti's impassioned renditions of Gluck in 'Mr Gilfil's Love Story' through to the elaborate operatic analogies that characterize the social milieu of Daniel Deronda. Despite these deeply-threaded affinities with opera, this is the first operatic adaptation of Middlemarch.

Barbara Hardy In France, Alain Jumeau

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Barbara Hardy was a well-known figure among French Victorianists, probably because she had written on three at least of the major novelists of the period, Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot, not to forget Thomas Hardy and a few others.

As far as I am concerned, when I started researching on George Eliot in the early seventies, I found her book The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form particularly inspiring. At that time, most critical studies dealing with George Eliot were either concerned with the problem of realism or with a purely moral approach. The notion of form, which …

Conference Report: Annual George Eliot Conference: Daniel Deronda, Institute Of English Studies, 7 November 2015, John Rignall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The conference opened with a characteristically rich and incisive paper by Barbara Hardy (Birkbeck), 'Re-Reading Daniel Deronda', which, sadly, was the last she was to deliver. In 'Daniel Deronda: The Two Halves That Were Never Whole', Isobel Armstrong (Birkbeck) presented a paper that will become part of her forthcoming book on Novel Politics: Democratic Imaginations and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. The 'Two Sequels to Daniel Deronda' discussed by John Rignall (Warwick) were a seven-page satirical squib in Mr Punch s Pocket-Book Jor 1877 entitled' Daniel Deronda Book IX', and a short novel, Gwendolen: or, Reclaimed: A Sequel to 'Daniel Deronda', published in …

Japanese Branch Report, Eri Satoh

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On Saturday 28 November 2015 , the Nineteenth Annual Convention of The George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at Obirin University.