Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

A Response- 2014, Barbara Hardy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Against Marianne Burton's carefully argued case for the consummation of the Casaubon marriage are images and hints which I mentioned in The Appropriate Form: an Essay on the Novel' and Particularities: Readings in George Eliot,' especially: the Cadwallader and Chettam opinions: 'A great bladder for dried peas to rattle in, and 'no good red blood'; the onanistic echo of 'the seeds of joy are forever wasted', (Middlemarch, Ch. 42); Casaubon's lack of bliss; post-marital absence of expectations of issue; 'the way' in which 'years to come' ... might be filled with joyful devotedness' became less clear …

Laughter Vesus Sympathy In Romola And Felix Holt, Louise Lee

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I want to start with a useful rather than a funny question posed by the critic Hilary M. Schor: 'What acts of information-organization do we perform on the Eliot career?'! The answer is possibly a succession of familiar base-touchings: Eliot's Warwickshire childhood and family life, the loss of her evangelical faith, her London journalism and reviewing, the development of her artistic values through engagement with European art and literature - the works of Baruch Spinoza, Ludwig Feuerbach, David Strauss, and Auguste Comte - and, of course, her partnership with George Henry Lewes. Other notable Eliot 'themes' might include science, religion, …

Review Of The Victorian Diary: Authorship And Emotional Labour, Anne-Marie Millim

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The diary genre has been repeatedly explored both as a confessional, retrospective form of writing and 'as an inherently female genre' (p. 17). Refreshingly, Millim challenges these approaches by stressing not only the genre's multiplicity, but also its ability to shape future, rather than past, experiences. This study is positioned alongside the more recent 'pragmatic, rather than ideological' (p. 23) approaches of Delafield's Women's Diaries as Narrative in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (2009) and Steinitz's Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth Century British Diary (2011). Millim's The Victorian Diary is less wide-ranging (unlike Delafield and Steinitz, she does not also …

In Memoriam Of Andrew Brown, Joanne Shattock

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Andrew Missak: Cleverley Brown died peacefully at home on 21 January 2014, days short of his sixty-fourth birthday, and only months after his retirement from the position of Development Director for Academic Publishing at Cambridge University Press. He joined the Press as a Graduate Trainee in 1976, and over subsequent decades was influential in developing first the literary studies list, then Humanities and Social Science more broadly, and finality the whole of Academic and Professional Publishing. While he had an extraordinary range of interests, his scholarly heartland was Victorian fiction: his Cambridge doctorate was on 'The Metaphysical Novels of Edward …

Japanese Branch Report- 2013, Ayako Tani

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On Saturday 7 December 2013, the Seventeenth Annual Convention of The George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at Keio University.

The morning session started with an opening address by Maiko Otake (Obirin University). Three papers were presented in the morning session. The first two were commented on by Toyotsugu Matsui (Daido University) and the third by Hideo Takano (Komazawa University).

The first speaker was Nanae Hama (Seinan Gakuin University), whose subject was 'The Hero Worship and the Imperial Consciousness: How George Eliot Described Heroes among Children'. In her presentation on The Mill on the Floss (1860), Hama argued that …

Romola's Religious Experience, Alain Jumeau

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Romola can be seen as a landmark in George Eliot's career, when we bear in mind her striking confession to her second husband, John Cross: 'I began it a young woman -, I finished it an old woman' (Haight [1968] 362). Many of her readers, indeed, felt it represented a new departure, far from the world of Adam Bede, Mrs Poyser and Silas Mamer. It was a more ambitious novel, with more refined and educated characters, set in a foreign country, in a distant past. Her first works of fiction were also set in the past, but only one or …

Review Of After Darwin: Animals, Emotions, And The Mind, Angelique Richardson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This extremely interesting and well organized collection of 11 original essays and an 'Afterword' is not greatly concerned with George Eliot, although it would seem every major Victorian concern somehow ends by involving her. As a study that aims at what its title indicates, it includes George Eliot and G. H. Lewes as direct subjects, hut only in one essay, Angelique Richardson's 'George Eliot, G. H. Lewes, and Darwin: Animals, Emotions, and Morals'. Although, she concedes, both 'maintained human distinction in their writing' (p. 137), George Eliot felt and expressed through anthropomorphism, a real kinship with animals. With Lewes (whose …

George Eliot Birthday Luncheon, 24 November 2013- The Toast To The Immortal Memory, Sheila Woolf

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

First of all, may I say what an enormous honour it is to be asked to speak on this very special occasion. When John asked me in January what I was doing on 24 November, I was obviously not quick enough to think of a reason to duck out of the responsibility! In fact, I wondered he had asked several others more agile with their excuses before he got round to me.

John asked me to speak about 'What George Eliot means to me'. In consequence, my speech will not be an academic one - those who went to the …

Politics And Pastoral In Silas Marner, Barbara Hardy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

When eighteen-year-old sumameless Eppie stands by Silas Mamer and against Godfrey Cass she joins a line of subversive children in Victorian fiction. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre speaks out against her aunt; Dickens's Oliver Twist asks for more gruel; his Paul Dombey asks the capitalist father, 'What is money after all?' One child rebels against adult power; one against institutional power; one against the cash nexus. The children are all economic dependants but there is no emphasis on class. Oliver behaves like a little gentleman; Paul is a little gentleman; Jane tells Brocklehurst she would not like to be poor, and …

Review Of Oscar Browing's Life Of George Eliot, Tapan Kumar Mukherjee

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I would like to draw the attention of interested readers and George Eliot scholars to one of the earliest biographies of George Eliot, that written by Oscar Browning. It is a book which, apart from many interesting anecdotes of her life, might still be valuable to them for the exhaustive annotated bibliography, compiled by John Parker Anderson of the British Museum, appended to the end of the volume. The extent and range of the bibliographical details collected there are the result of very thorough, painstaking research which may provide further new insights and give clues to unexplored areas in the …

George Eliot And Psychosomatic Illness: A Footnote To The Biographies, Brenda Mckay

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

A reader of George Eliot's novels, with their luminous intelligence and authoritative command of a fictional world, might be surprised to learn that this author was actually frequently tormented by crises of confidence, exhaustion and bodily pain. Her illnesses were often exacerbated by her novel-writing; but certainly not always. '[M]y life’, as she wrote, 'has always been much broken by physical malaise'.' She later commented that, despite extensive medical tests, the doctors could find nothing wrong with her. The word 'malaise' suggests extreme somatic discomfort, not necessarily associated with disease, but also depression. Eliot herself was aware, as she acknowledged …

Obituary Of Andrew Brown, Joanne Shattock

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I first met Andrew Brown on the conference circuit in the early 1980s. As the recently appointed senior editor for literature at Cambridge University Press he was a regular presence at Victorian Studies conferences, wearing his Press hat, but unlike many other publishers, attending as a productive scholar in his own right. He got in touch with me in 1989 asking if he could come to Leicester to talk about a project he was contemplating, a new edition of the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, the nineteenth-century volume of which had been last updated under George Watson's editorship in 1969. …

Review Of George Eliot In Context, Margaret Harris

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This collection offers a wide range of individual and rigorous criticism, with essays by the most informed specialists: amongst others, Margaret Harris on 'Biographies’, John Rignall on 'Landscape' and 'Metropolitanism’, Melissa Raines on 'Language', Leonee Ormond on 'The Visual Arts', Ruth Livesey on 'Class' and 'Transport', Joanne Shattock on 'Editions ' and 'Publishing and Publishers’, Richard Menke on 'Industry and technology'. Texts in context include journalism as well as fiction and poetry.

I have a few reservations. Most of the essays are remarkably condensed but one or two have more breadth than depth. In 'Travel and Tourism' Judith 10hnston touches …

'In Isolation Human Power Is Limited, In Combination It Is Infinite': Tracing Ludwig Feuerbach's Essence Of Christianity Through Daniel Deronda, Milena Schwab-Graham

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Written between January 1873 and June 1876, Daniel Deronda was George Eliot's final and most ambitious novel. The Jewish-born, later excommunicated Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, whose Ethics Eliot translated in 1856, would perhaps seem the more obvious choice of philosophical context for our analysis of Deronda, owing to his religious affinity with the eponymous protagonist. However, Ludwig Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, translated by Eliot in 1854, provides a more thorough basis for drawing out the ethical complexities of her final novel. Feuerbach's philosophy, the influence of which is integral to all her novels, hinges upon 'the moral [ ...] qualitative, …

Chairman's Annual Report For 2013, John Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

We can be pleased with the Fellowship's year in 2013. For some time now we have tried to add extra events to the well-established series of meetings built up over the years. In 2013 we looked towards Coventry to provide a theme for the year, and were delighted with the results, much helped, it has to be said, by the enthusiasm and new ideas brought to the Fellowship by Vanessa Oakes, whose writing skills have much enhanced our programme. The other major event for the year was our emergence, blinking and floundering, into the world of websites and Facebook (Twitter …

Casaubon's Impotence: A Literary Libel?, Marianne Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

There are some literary hypotheses which so suit readers' impressions of a text that they become accepted almost as literary fact, as if they were stated in the text itself or had been confirmed by the author in an interview, letter or notebook. This seems to have become the case with Edward Casaubon's sexual impotence in Middlemarch. Gordon Haight complained that undergraduates 'despite a generation of sex-education' never failed to describe Casaubon as impotent simply by virtue of his age. Casaubon was around forty-eight. Haight was seventy-three when he wrote this essay, and indignantly listed the famous men who had …

Relation And Responsibility: A Levinasian Reading Of King Lear, Kent Lehnhof

English Faculty Articles and Research

Emmanuel Levinas’s ideas about intersubjectivity can change our reading of Shakespeare by putting philosophical pressure on Shakespeare’s dramatization of human relatedness in The Tragedy of King Lear (1607–8). Even though Levinas does not discuss Lear at length in any of his published work, this difficult philosopher and this difficult play have much to say to one another. Levinas can be fruitfully brought to bear on Shakespeare’s great tragedy, generating fresh and productive ideas about its most pivotal moments, its most perplexing questions, and its most popular interpretations. In addition, Levinas can provide a useful frame for discussing the nature of …

Eye For The Gap: Frenzy, Liberty, And The Nietszchean Chorus In Conor Mcpherson's The Weir And Shining City, Frances Krieg

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This study situates The Weir and Shining City by Conor McPherson as embodying elements of Dionysian aesthetics as elucidated by Friedrich Nietzsche. Working through the lenses of Samuel Beckett’s linguistic philosophy and the premium of theater as established by Nietzsche, Artaud, and Brecht, the aim of this paper is to demonstrate how McPherson pierces the boundaries of language in drama by establishing his audience as chorus. Background information on Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and McPherson’s own comments on the plays are included with the research on the plays themselves. This work articulates the chorus itself but also the choral, …

The Role Of Strangers In Victorian Novels: A Psychoanalytical Study Of Their Repressions, Functions And Aspirations, Mohammad Ahmed Al-Abdulrazaq

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The aim of this study is to examine the stranger characters in three Victorian Novels, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge and Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. The exploration of the characters is based on the analysis of their psyche to understand how they are utilized by the Victorian writers. The study highlights how the fictional strangers can assist in the course of the action of the novel and function as a stimulus by which the actions and thoughts develop plausibly and feasibly. Utilizing the views of Freud, Erikson and others the study will allow for …

"Every Child In Our World Will Know His Name!": Malcolm Gladwell's Theories As An Explanation For The Cultural Phenomenon Of Harry Potter, Alicia Morgan

Masters Theses

When Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone hit stores in the United States in 1998, children and adults alike went wild. Not only had Rowling's first book made huge waves in the UK, but Americans were talking about the struggling, single-parent who had penned a children's classic before the book even reached American stores. American audiences accepted Rowling's first novel with open arms, making it one of the first children's books to reach and occupy The New York Times best-seller list for so long. While certain marketing techniques and the rise of the Internet did contribute to Harry Potter's initial …