English Language and Literature Commons^™

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 …

Felix Holt: The Radical And The Gusset Of Cryptic Futurity, Rodney Stenning Edgecombe

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Most Victorian novels avail themselves of tidying codas in which the author projects the story into a future-turned-present and, counterpointed by wedding bells, maps out as close an approximation to the 'happily ever after' formula as the constraints of realism will allow. The locus classicus for this procedure occurs at the end of Martin Chuzzlewit:

And coming from a garden, Tom, bestrewn with flowers by children's hands, thy sister, little Ruth, as light of foot and heart as in old days, sits down beside thee. From the Present, and the Past, with which she is so tenderly entwined in all …

Conference Report: Annual George Eliot Conference: Middlemarch, Institute Of English Studies, 22 November 2014, A.G. Van Den Broek

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Only by combining papers on Romola and Felix Holt. did the 2013 George Eliot Conference manage to attract a tolerably-sized audience; no such problems for the 2014 Conference on Middlemarch. This excellent event was oversubscribed and had to be moved to the biggest room in the Institute of English Studies at the University of London. Barbara Hardy (Birkbeck, London and Swansea) and Louise Lee (Roehampton) yet again organized everything, bringing together a group of speakers who made us think about widely differing issues to do with Eliot's occasional uncertainty, Eliot and Mrs. Gaskell, the sex lives of young nineteenth-century women, …

Review Of George Eliot And Money: Economics, Ethics And Literature, Dermot Coleman

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This is an important book which fills a gap in George Eliot studies by exploring with impressive authority the novelist's handling of money and economics in her life and work, on the premise that, for her, the economic was an essential constituent of a 'comprehensive ethical understanding' (p. 8). The author is unusually well-qualified for an analysis of economic theory and practice, having co-founded a hedge fund in the late 1990s and retired from the business of investment management shortly before the financial crisis of 2008. He modestly disclaims any foreknowledge of that crisis but points out that his knowledge …

How Much Did Dorothea And Celia Know? Sexual Ignornace And Knowledge Among Unmarried Girls In Middlemarch, Marianne Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Readers, in my experience, often make an assumption that unmarried girls in nineteenth century novels know nothing about sex, and this seems to be particularly the case regarding Dorothea Brooke. Had she only known about sex, so the adage goes, she would never have made her disastrous marriage choice. In this article I would like to examine this assumption in closer detail, looking not just at Dorothea and Celia, but also Rosamond Vincy and Mary Garth. I do not necessarily want to turn the notion on its head - I am not going to claim these girls were closet readers …

Review Of Middlemarch: Critical Approaches To The Novel, Barbara Hardy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This book is a reprint of the 1967 edition published by the Athlone Press, one of '56 classic works of literary criticism' that Bloomsbury is reprinting from Athlone Press. This opportunity to revisit and reassess works that were highly regarded in their day should be welcomed and one hopes that the archives of other academic publishers may also be subject to similar treatment. It is not good for the health of literary criticism if significant studies of the past are not easily accessible to readers and critics in the present.

I remember reading this book fairly close to when it …

Japanese Branch Report- 2014, Eri Kobayashi

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On 29 November 2014, at the 18th General Meeting of the George Eliot Fellowship of Japan, three papers on George Eliot's novels were read in the morning session. In the afternoon, a symposium on Eliot's poems was held and in the evening session a keynote speech was given by Professor Minoru Kawakita.

Chaired by Professor Kimitaka Hara (Nihon University), the morning session saw our first speaker, Masako Ishii (Kyoto University), discussing The Mill on the Floss from the standpoint of the destiny of Maggie Tulliver, especially in relation to her conflict with the socially restrictive norms of a provincial town …

Mr. Booke's Thinking Organ, Kate Osborne

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

A scene in Middlemarch's thirtieth chapter describes how the creative process can slip out of a writer's control.! A letter has arrived from Mr. Casaubon's estranged cousin, Will Ladislaw, asking whether Will may visit Casaubon and Dorothea at their home at Lowick. But Casaubon is gravely ill and Dorothea is so overwhelmed by her husband's illness and also by the thought of seeing Will that she cannot even read the letter. She asks her uncle, Mr. Brooke, to reply in her stead, 'to let Will know that Casaubon had been ill, and that his health would not allow the reception …

Not The Whole Story: Narrative Responses To Contemporary Globalization, Sean Patrick O'Brien

Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes contemporary global fiction in English (and, in one chapter, new media literatures such as videogame-based narratives) to examine how individuals, communities, and globalized networks manage differences among historical interpretations, ideologies, lived experiences, and cultural and national traditions making competing demands. Cultural and media theorists like John Tomlinson, Anthony Giddens, Arjun Appadurai, Lev Manovich, and Ian Bogost have demonstrated the overwhelming complexity of life in an age of accelerating globalization. Building on their work and the narrative theory of Maggie Dunn and Ann Morris, I explore how literary narratives employ newly prominent composite narrative structures to represent and …

Trust Rust, William H. Lane

Gettysburg College Faculty Books

Trust Rust is a book of poems rooted in the landscape of south central Pennsylvania that explore the ambiguities of our relationship with nature and one another.

The Fecundity Of The Figural: Ethical And Phototextual Di-Vision In Postmodern American Fiction, Brian Scott Carroll

English Dissertations - Archive

This study contends that sites of the phototextual--that is, narrative works that employ as their chief structural basis any photographic disposition, such as, for example, tangible portraiture and/or a literary styling that implements photographic properties or theory--may be the ideal way to encounter, experience, and respect active (meta)physical exchanges between the Self and Other in the temporal spaces of postmodern American fiction and beyond. By engaging with a pluralistic ethical paradigm comprised from the thought of philosophers like Levinas, Barthes, Derrida, Badiou, and Irigaray, this dissertation examines an array of American phototexts ascribed to the postmodern epoch. Thusly, this very …

Media And Literary Representations Of Latinos In Baseball And Baseball Fiction, Mihir Dilip Parekh

English Theses - Archive

The first chapter of this project looks at media representations of two Mexican-born baseball players – Fernando Valenzuela and Teodoro “Teddy” Higuera – pitchers who made their big league debuts in the 1980s and garnered significant attention due to their stellar play and ethnic backgrounds. Chapter one looks at U.S. media narratives of these Mexican baseball players and their focus on these foreign athletes’ bodies when presenting them the American public, arguing that 1980s U.S. news media focuses its attention on each pitcher’s body but constructs differing media narratives when doing so, with Valenzuela’s body discussed in terms of culture …

Goddess Of The Savannah: Beatrice As Achebe’S Sensible Solution, Gillian Renee Singler

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This paper argues that Beatrice in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah is a character whose democratic nature creates a place for voices typically excluded in the novel’s government. Functioning under the common assumption that Anthills of the Savannah is a political allegory, it is Beatrice’s democratic nature that makes her an ideal political leader. By blending change and tradition, Beatrice is able to form an inclusive and evolving solution to the novel’s leadership problem. The paper briefly reflects on colonialism’s role in destroying the socioeconomic and political systems already in place in African nations, specifically Nigeria, and the byproduct …

Middle Eastern-American Literature: A Contemporary Turn In Emerson Studies, Roger Sedarat

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.