Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Political And Theoretical Feminisms In American Folkloristics: Definition Debates, Publication Histories, And The Folklore Feminists Communication, Jeana Jorgensen

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

What role does feminist theory play in American folkloristics, and which versions of feminism have become mainstreamed in the nearly forty years since folklorists first became attuned to the promises and premises of feminism? By attending to these issues, I hope to at least partially answer the question Alan Dundes asked in his 2004 Invited Presidential Plenary Address to the American Folklore Society: "What precisely is the 'theory' in feminist theory?" (2005, 388). In lamenting the lack of grand theory in folkloristics, Dundes remarks, ''Despite the existence of books and articles with 'feminist theory' in their titles, one looks in …

From Jook Joints To Sisterspace: The Role Of Nature In Lesbian Alternative Environments In The United States, Nancy Unger

History

Despite the depth and breadth of Catriona Sandilands's groundbreaking "Lesbian Separatist Communities and the Experience of Nature," with its emphasis on communities in southern Oregon, Sandilands does not consider her article, published in 2002, to be "the last one on the topic." Instead she hopes "fervently that other researchers will enter into the ongoing conversation [about queer landscapes)" (136). This essay is an answer to her invitation to draw further "insight from queer cultures to form alternative, even transformative, cultures of nature" (135). It examines the role of place in the history of American lesbians, particularly the role of nonhuman …

Male Same-Sex Relations In Modern China: Language, Media Representation, And Law, 1900–1949, Wenqing Kang

History Faculty Publications

The article discusses the tension in the Chinese indigenous terminology for male same-sex relations which was similar to Eve Sedgwich's description of the Western modern homosexual/heterosexual definition. It argues that the Western sexological concept of homosexuality was accepted in the early 20th century China and notes that its legal apparatus had no clear stipulations on sex between men. It indicates how writers during the first half of the 20th century were more concerned with the proper gender behavior and the image of the nation than sex itself.

The Effects Of Gestalt And Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Group Interventions On The Assertiveness And Self-Esteem Of Women With Physical Disabilities Facing Abuse, Cilene Susan Adam Rita

Wayne State University Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the differential effects of Gestalt and Cognitive-Behavioral group therapy interventions on assertiveness and self-esteem among women with physical disabilities facing abuse. The eleven women, who met the study criteria, were randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions, Gestalt Therapy (GT) and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) group interventions. The Demographic Questionnaire (Adam Rita, 2009) documented personal characteristics of the participants. The criterion instruments were: a) RAS (Rathus, 1973), and b) CFSEI-2 (Form AD, Battle, 1992) measuring assertiveness and self-esteem respectively and were administered pre-and-post treatment. The research was conducted over a period of …

Mrs. Meyrick's Cat, Derek Miller

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

'''Great God!" the words escaped Deronda' as he watched the just-prevented-from-drowning Mirah. 'The old thought had come now with a new impetus of mingled feeling, and urged that exclamation in which both East and West have for ages concentrated their awe in the presence of inexorable calamity.'!

Among those who welcome Mirah to Mrs. Meyrick's household is the cat Hafiz, seen by Deronda as it 'came forward with tail erect and rubbed himself against her ankles', an Eastern moment accompanying Mirah's entrance into the Meyrick family. Hafiz is later to purr as Mirah starts to tell her story to Mrs. …

Review Of Charles Dickens, Michael Slater

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On the first page of this splendid new biography, Dickens is cited referring to his own earliest writings as 'certain tragedies achieved at the mature age of eight or ten and represented with great applause to overflowing nurseries'. The genially tongue-in-cheek celebration of his own precociousness is entirely characteristic, with the final flourish of 'overflowing nurseries' an example of the kind of 'unnecessary detail' that Orwell identified as a typical device of Dickensian comedy. 'Overflowing' both transforms the brief recollection into a comic scene and indicates the essential quality of the creative imagination at work here. A very different writer …

Review Of Women Reviewing Women In Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Critical Reception Of Lane Austen, Charlotte Bronte And George Eliot, Joanne Wilkes

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The subtitle of Joanne Wilkes' elegant and meticulous monograph is somewhat misleading. Although Austen, Bronte and Eliot make regular appearances, as one would expect the three major female literary figures of the nineteenth century to do, the work does not seek to investigate their critical histories - something which Wilkes has already done in a compelling essay published in Joanne Shattock's collection Women and Literature in Britain, 1800-1900 (2001). Instead, Wilkes' attention here is firmly directed at the careers of the critics who, for the most part, remain on the margins of Victorian studies: Maria Jane Jewsbury, Sara Coleridge, Hannah …

'Hetty Had Never Read A Novel': Adam Bede And Realism, Rachel Bowlby

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It is not just the famous Chapter 17, 'In Which the Story Pauses a Little’, which makes George Eliot's Adam Bede one of the first candidates for any discussion of the tenets and aims of nineteenth-century literary realism. The question is opened in the very first paragraph of the novel - so very prominently, perhaps, and in so many dimensions, that we may miss its compacted meanings as we read on or rush on, past the beginning, to enter the narrative. Much of its meaning, of course, is not immediately available without the understandings that subsequent chapters will add, including …

George Eliot Birthday Luncheon, 22 November 2009- The Toast To The Immortal Memory, Beryl Gray

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

2009 is the 150th anniversary of the publication of two works of fiction by George Eliot. As no one here could fail to know, throughout the year there have been all kinds of celebrations of her first - and wonderful- novel, Adam Bede (and the word has spread even to London of great Adam Bede happenings in these parts). On the other hand, I've heard of nothing commemorating 'The Lifted Veil', which appeared in the same year as the novel. While this strange, supernatural tale of an acutely sensitive, unproductive poet whose clairvoyance alienates him from his fellow mortals is …

Japanese Branch Report- 2009, Yohko Nagai

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Overlooking the meandering Edo River and the panoramic view of the Tokyo skyline, the thirteenth annual convention of the George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at the scenic campus of Wayo Women's University on Saturday, 28 November 2009.

After an opening remark by Mizue Aida of Nihon University, a welcome address was made by Midori Uematsu, a professor of Wayo Women's University. This year we had the privilege of listening to four papers in the morning session. The first two papers were chaired by Akiko Kimura, of Waseda University and the last two papers by Itsuyo Shimizu of Kinki …

The Art Of Conduct, The Conduct Of Art And The 'Mixed Science' Of Eliot's Ethics: ' Sympathetic Impulse' And 'The Scientific Point Of View' In The Mill On The Floss, Simon Calder

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The Mill on the Floss is full of keys and clues. Most famously, Maggie Tolliver, following her father's bankruptcy, 'wanted some key that would enable her to understand and, in understanding, endure, the heavy weight that had fallen on her young heart.' 1 In chapter three of Book Four of Eliot's novel, Maggie believes herself to have found just such a key in Thomas a Kempis's The Imitation of Christ (MF, 298):

Here, then, was a secret of life that would enable her to renounce all other secrets ... [F]or the first time she saw the possibility of shifting the …

Editor's Note - 2010

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

1. The articles in this issue by Dinah Birch, Rachel Bowlby, Barbara Hardy, and Josephine McDonagh were originally delivered as papers at the Adam Bede conference held at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, on 7 November 2009.

George Eliot As Historian: The Case Of Mr. Crewe And Hugh Hughes, David Paterson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Historians look for as many different sources of evidence as they can to describe and interpret the past. How far is fiction a valid source? Great fiction may reveal great truths but is this only in a general sense? George Eliot herself seems to suggest above that reliance on 'descriptions of novelists' may be a perilous route to an accurate portrait: but what about relying on descriptions of those in her own books? Despite one specific denial, some of her 'portraits of clergymen' contain valuable historical elements.

An examination of one part of Scenes of Clerical Life shows George Eliot's …

The Representation Of Place In Middlemarch, Adam Wright

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Critics in the past have tended to refer to the rootedness of characters in George Eliot's novels. This is particularly true of Adam Bede, where the naturalistic roots of characters are often explicitly stated, such as when Dinah affirms 'I'm not free to leave Snowfield, where I was first planted, and have grown deep into it, like the small grass on the hill-top'.1 Catherine Middleton, in her essay 'Roots and Rootlessness', when analysing Middlemarch refers to seven different types of roots in just four pages (,emotional', 'physical', 'moral', 'affective', 'social', 'intellectual' ,and 'local').2 These terms not only complicate our understanding …

Notes On Middlemarch And Romola, Rodney Stenning Edgecombe

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Rereading Middlemarch and Romola recently, 1 was struck by some unrecorded musical and literary parallels, none of them substantial enough (or indeed sufficiently interconnected) to be woven into an integrated article, but having, 1 hope, enough intrinsic interest to warrant my presenting them here as so many Casaubonic 'leavings' that might or might not be incorporated into future work on the author.

A Schubertian Moment in Middlemarch

George Eliot's enthusiasm for the Lieder of Schubert is attested by a letter written in October, 1859 - 'Schubert's songs, 1 especially delight in' (Letters, Ill: 178) - and our knowledge of that …

'Good Teaching': Adam Bede And Education, Dinah Birch

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot's commitment to teaching motivates her writing from the first. Like many of those whose thinking was shaped by early nineteenth-century evangelicalism, she saw education as a vital responsibility. In 1847, when she was twenty-eight years old, she remarked to Sara Hennell that she thought '''Live and Teach" should be a proverb as well as "Live and Learn"'.1 Eliot's persistent interest in teaching and learning was a reason for her turning to fiction as her primary medium as a writer - not the only reason, but an important one. She had no inclination whatsoever to become a professional teacher, …

Annual Report 2009, John Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I am pleased to report that last year was a successful one. There are things we might have done better, or differently, but I think we can say that 2009 was marked by events which provided huge pleasure and satisfaction for our members, and for a much wider audience beyond our membership.

The AGM last year heard a request from Liz Mellor for some sabbatical time whilst she dealt with health problems and members agreed to that request. We then held a discussion about the Fellowship and what we hoped to see develop in the future. Members enjoyed the chance …

Expressive Things In Adam Bede, Barabar Hardy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

A drop of ink is the first thing in the first sentence of George Eliot's first novel: 'With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance corner farreaching visions of the past.' Like many objects in Adam Bede, this one is more complicated than first appears. In its generalized imaging of magical creation, ritual and prophesy, it is an invocation, introducing and solemnizing the other object with which it is twinned and compared, the real drop of ink at the end of the author's pen which has actually written this sorcerer's …

Review Of Daniel Deronda

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

A dramatized version of Daniel Deranda scripted by John Cooper was produced by the Traffic of the Stage Company at the Upstairs at the Gatehouse Theatre in Highgate in May. Directed by Harry Meacher, it had a cast of seventeen actors who between them played forty-one different parts. The audience sat on three sides of the acting area (the floor of which was patterned like a giant roulette wheel) and the actors, when not directly engaged in the action, moved to the edges of this space where they would, when appropriate (i.e., when the scene was a party or some …

Superior Domesticity: Two George Eliot Cats, Beryl Gray

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The Persian cat, Hafiz, appears in two scenes in Daniel Deronda (1876) .1 The first of these appearances occurs in chapter 18, which introduces the compact, creative little Meyrick women - mother and three daughters - just as they are about to become Mirah Lapidoth's hospitable benefactresses, though she is as yet unknown to them. They are gathered harmoniously together in the evening lamp- and candle-lit, miniature double parlour of their narrow riverside house. 'All four, if they had been wax-work, might have been packed easily in a fashionable lady's travelling trunk.'2 Their corporeal diminutiveness is …