Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

'And Her Wings Fall From Her And She Drops To The Ground': Reading Eliot's Mr Casaubon Through Benjamin Jowett's Phaedrus, Royce Best

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In the scene describing Casaubon 's pathetic mental state prior to his heart attack in Chapter XXIX of Middlemarch, the narrator makes an enigmatic reference: 'Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under anxious control'.' It seems odd to conclude this powerful passage, long read as a telling example of the hazards of over-study without meaningful application, with a reference to ancient Greek drama. Yet, perhaps not enough attention has been given to the indebtedness …

Review Of Heathen And Outcast: Scenes In The Life Of George Eliot, Robert Muscutt

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This fictionalized version of George Eliot's life between 1841 and 1854 takes as its starting point Edith Simcox's account of visiting the Midlands after the novelist's death and collecting material for a biography which, in the end, was never written. Thus the first section of four chapters is titled 'From Conversations with Maria Lewis' and is written in the latter 's voice, while the second section of two chapters follows the same pattern and is narrated by Charles Bray. The Simcox framework of posthumous interviews falters in the final section of eight chapters since here the narration is taken over …

The Two Felixes: Narrational Irony And The Questions Of Radicalism In Felix Holt And 'Address To Working Men, By Felix Holt', Helen Kingstone

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In this characterization of Dorothea by the narrator of Middlemarch (1871-2), the 'Great' Reform Act of 1832 is posited as a dividing line between two phases of history, so distinct as to have separate spheres of interest and judgements of normality. George Eliot flatters her mid-Victorian reader by insinuating that only the 'modem' mind of their shared present could understand the zeal of a humanistic 'exalted enthusiasm' that took its source of energy from within. In this passage, therefore, 'reform' seems to be the key to historical, social and personal change. The issue of reform - of society, of institution …

Review Of George Eliot In Society: Travels Abroad And Sundays At The Priory, Kathleen Mccormack

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This is a welcome and wholly worthwhile extension of the author's George Eliot's English Travels: Composite Characters and Coded Communication (2005), a densely written and stimulating examination of places and people in Eliot's life which have some resonance, in varying degrees of coding, from the seemingly casual to the subtly integrated, in her published work. McCormack there defined three categories of place identification. These range from 'absolute certainties' through 'pretty good cases' to 'alluring, probable, but irretrievably speculative suppositions', categories certainly applicable to herpresent study, in which her dedication and saturation in George Eliot, the works, the life, and a …

The Golden Gates Are Passed, Robert Muscutt

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

There have always been attempts not just to conceal knowledge of George Eliot's life but also to manipulate it into conformity with a preconceived profile. In the Preface to his edition of The George Eliot Letters in nine volumes, Gordon Haight revealed that those pages of her Journal from immediately after her father's death in 1849 until shortly before she went to Weimar with Lewes in 1854 were tom out and presumably destroyed, probably by Cross. Charles Lewes, George Eliot's main literary executor, also seems to have destroyed nine of his father 's journals, the first volume extant beginning in …

'The Antigone And Its Moral': George Eliot's Antigonean Considerations, Kathryn Brigger Kruger

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

As early as 1856 with the publication of the essay, 'The Antigone and Its Moral' ,1 George Eliot turned her literary attention to the Sophoclean figure of Antigone. Scholars such as Gerhard Joseph' and David Moldstad' have enumerated Eliot's multiple references to Antigone, and they have argued that Eliot makes Antigone a relevant figure for '"modern" life' (Joseph, 27) and an example of 'the continuity of man's elemental self, concerned in all ages with similar needs and problems, though moral codes have come and gone' (Moldstad, 531). Where Joseph traces the specific Antigone references in Eliot's fiction - especially in …

Review Of Reading For Our Time: 'Adam Bede' And 'Middlemarch' Revisited, J. Hillis Miller

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

As his sub-title indicates, J. Hillis Miller is returning in his latest book to the study of George Eliot, bringing to bear on Adam Bede and Middlemarch the insight and erudition acquired in a long and distinguished career as a scholar and critic. He pursues a similar line to his wellknown articles from the 1970s on 'Narrative and History' and 'Optic and Semiotic in Middlemarch', subjecting that novel to a close and tenacious deconstructive reading that brings out the sophisticated self-qualifying nature of George Eliot's fiction. This is preceded by a shorter discussion of Adam Bede which shows how its …

Japanese Branch Report- 2012, Shinsuke Hori

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On Saturday 1 December 2012, the Sixteenth Annual Convention of the George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at Kansai University of Foreign Studies.

The morning session started with an opening address by Chizuko Watari (Kansai University of Foreign Studies). Three papers were presented in the morning session. The first two were commented upon by Midori Niino (Kobe University of Foreign Studies) and the third by Masayuki Kato (Kobe University).

The first speaker was Ayako Tani (Fukuoka University), whose subject was 'The Idea of a Double in Daniel Deronda: Grandcourt's Death and Gwendolen's Rebirth'. Grandcourt's death has been often criticized …

The Forty-First George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 2012- Romola's Artists, Leonee Ormond

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

2012-2013 marks the one hundred and fiftieth birthday of Romola. Originally published in the Comhill Magazine from July 1862 to August 1863, it later appeared in a three volume edition in 1863. An illustrated edition followed in 1865.

George Eliot had begun work on the novel in 1861, when she was forty-one. She had recently published Silas Mamer, and The Mill on the Floss, preceded by Adam Bede, had come out not long before that. The genesis of Romola came in May 1860 when George Eliot and George Henry Lewes spent two weeks in Florence. Lewes noted that, …

Review Of Form And Feeling In Modern Literature: Essays In Honour Of Barbara Hardy, Isobel Armstrong, William Baker

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Does criticism move in circles and cycles? Perhaps, like a Yeatsian gyre, it progresses by revolving and rotating. If times have changed utterly since the appearance of Barbara Hardy's first book, The Novels of George Eliot (1959), then it is also hard to ignore how some new directions in criticism appear to be rediscovering matters close to this great critic's heart. Form and feeling, certainly, are both back. Professor Hardy used these two unfussy terms to describe, respectively, literature's structured way of happening and its potential to arouse or enrich a reader's felt experience; now, in the more modish guises …

George Eliot, Marcel Proust, And The Logic Of Desire, Kenichi Kurata

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The influence of George Eliot's fiction on Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time has often been discussed. For instance, L. A. Bisson drew attention in 1945 to 'the possibility, even the likelihood, of[ ... ] [an] immediate and sympathetic suggestion' by Eliot, citing Proust's claim in 1910 that 'II n'y a pas de litterature qui ait sur moi un pouvoir comparable a la litterature anglaise ... deux pages du Moulin sur la Floss me font pleurer.'2 Bisson goes on to suggest that three specific passages in The Mill on the Floss have their counterparts in Proust's work, the …

Chairman's Annual Report 2012, John Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The year began in March with an introduction to Romo/a for the Nuneaton George Eliot Study Group which was attended by nearly forty local members. This was followed up by more in depth sessions on Romola at Bedworth Almshouses after Easter. These sessions were aimed at those going to Florence in November, to walk in Romola's footsteps. Numbers were constant throughout the sessions and we ended the ten sessions by watching the 1924 silent film version of the book. The study notes for these sessions will be made available to members worldwide on the website

Following the AGM that same …

Review Of The Ladislaw Case, Inke Thormahlen

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

We live in an age of prequels and sequels either in book form or in television serials, with nineteenth-century novelists providing the majority of the material for contemporary writers to develop or elaborate. It was perhaps only a matter of time before one of George Eliot's novels was to form the basis for such treatment. In this case the novel is probably her greatest, Middlemarch, and the sequel, The Ladislaw Case, is the first major work of a young Swedish graduate of Lund University, Imke Thormahlen.

Twelve years after the conclusion of Middlemarch, Will Ladislaw, now married to Dorothea (Brooke, …

George Eliot, Scientific Materialism And Literary Form: Some Relfections On Felicia Bonaparte's Will And Destiny, K.M. Newton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Felicia Bonaparte's study of Eliot's fiction, Will and Destiny: Morality and Tragedy in George Eliot's Novels, was published in 1975. I read it rather quickly towards the end of the 1970s because at the time I was working on a study of Eliot of my own and inevitably my attention was somewhat focused on whether there was going to be any overlap with my book. Since Bonaparte's book argued strongly that Eliot was intellectually committed to empiricism and scientific rationality and mine attempted to bring out her relation to aspects …

Employment Relations And The Failure Of Sympathy In Hardy’S Desperate Remedies And The Mayor Of Casterbridge, Lauren Hoffer

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Queering The Sublime: Virginia Woolf, Sexology, And Sexuality, Emily Whitmore

Masters Theses

Using Virginia Woolf's novels, The Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando, I begin to explore moments where the characters experience the sublime as defined by Edmund Burke. Woolf uses the traditional sublime, but complicates the concept beyond its initial intention. The moments that mimic the sublime, but include the body, the natural world, and artistic creativity grows into what I will call the "queer sublime," which is new for both Woolf scholarship and for the sublime. Woolf's experimentation with the term and part of the "queer sublime" also helps to create a different …

Pubs, Temperance, And The Construction Of Irishness In James Joyce's Ulysses, Leslie Sweet Myrick

Masters Theses

Ulysses can be read as a bar crawl; three episodes and part of a fourth are set in public houses, while various characters walk to and from drinking activities and establishments throughout the day. However, Ulysses' main character, Leopold Bloom, is an extremely moderate drinker and not considered "a regular" patron at any public house. His practicing of temperance is one example of how Bloom does not embody the typical Irish masculinity. However, the drinking culture in Ulysses has not been fully explored in context of the temperance movement which was an ongoing cause in 1904 Dublin despite Guinness's Brewery …

Kings Of Infinite Space: Cartography And Identity In Literature, 1599 - 1914, Caroline Mills

English Honors Papers

Mapping and writing are both attempts to describe some truth about the human experience. While maps may seem utilitarian, or at best art objects with aesthetic value, I believe that the maps we create for ourselves also function as maps of ourselves. I am primarily concerned with the places where maps and literature intersect — where literature employs the logic and rhetoric of cartography, and maps have narrative value. Where the two overlap, ideas of national identity and individual identity merge. Formally, there is a distinct difference between the “God’s-eye view” that a map provides and the linear nature of …

Liminal Leda: A Conversation About Art, Poetry, And Vague Translations Of Sex, Molly Pistrang

English Honors Papers

My paper explores the idea that Leda has been used throughout recent history as a vehicle through which artists and poets talk non-explicitly about sex. After presenting her undetermined mythical origins in chapter one, I explore different identities assumed by Leda during the half century prior to Yeats. In chapter two, I focus on Leda as universal woman, explicit character, and one who looks. In chapter three, I move to Leda's larger roles as liminal figure and portrait, and discuss the changing role of exterior versus interior perspective. Chapter four is a detailed study on Yeats' sonnet that develops into …

Pedagogy And Identity In "The Night Lessons" Of Finnegans Wake, Zachary Paul Smola

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores chapter II.ii of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939)—commonly called "The Night Lessons"—and its peculiar use of the conventions of the textbook as a form. In the midst of the Wake's abstraction, Joyce uses the textbook to undertake a rigorous exploration of epistemology and education. By looking at the specific expectations of and ambitions for textbooks in 19th century Irish national schools, this thesis aims to provide a more specific historical context for what textbooks might mean as they appear in Finnegans Wake. As instruments of cultural conditioning, Irish textbooks were fraught with tension arising from their investment …