Comparative Literature Commons^™

Death And Recollection: The Elegiac Dimension Of Scenes Of Clerical Life, John Rignall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Perversely, though perhaps appropriately for a paper on death, I want to begin at the end. George Eliot's last novel, Daniel Deronda, ends with a good death: that of Ezra Mordecai, dying with the arms of Mirah and Deronda around him, and feeling 'an ocean of peace beneath him'. The deaths that immediately precede it in her fiction, Grandcourt's drowning in the same novel, or the deaths of Featherstone, Casaubon and Raffles in Middlemarch are of a different order: those figures go more or less unlamented to their graves, and their passing may even be a form of liberation for …

Notes On Contributors - 2009

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Lucy Amis is the daughter of Margaret Wolfit and currently works at the International Business Leaders Forum, a London-based educational charity which focuses on how global companies can conduct their business in ways that demonstrate respect for their workers and nearby communities.

Juliette Atkinson currently teaches at the Open University. Forthcoming works include the monograph Victorian Biography Reconsidered: a Study of Nineteenth-Century 'Hidden' Lives (OUP) and an edition of critical responses to George Eliot's novels that will appear as a volume in the series Bloom s Classic Critical Views (Facts on File, 2009).

Josie Billington teaches at the University of …

George Eliot's Middlemarch As A Translation Of Spinoza's Ethics, Miriam Henson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In 1846 John Chapman of Newgate Street published a translation of David Strauss's Das Leben Jesu. Although no translator was accredited, this book was the result of two years' arduous work by Mary Ann Evans, the woman who would later achieve renown as George Eliot. Strauss's presentation of Jesus is that of a historical figure; he denies his divine status, and suggests that the miracles written about in the Gospels are mythic in nature. Although Mary Ann was distressed by Strauss's destruction of all the 'miraculous and highly improbable' elements of the Gospel, she too had, for some time, been …

Orchestrating Society: The Merging Of Language And Voice To Create Social Bonds In Romola, Jennifer Diann Jones

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot's Romola (1863) reflects her interest in using musical metaphor to explain how relationships are formed. She explores more fully than she has done before this point in her career how language and the human voice function as music; she theorizes the function of voice more explicitly than she had done before as she examines how it can possess the listener and incite people to action.

There are very few scenes of actual musical performance in Romola and in George Eliot and Music, Beryl Gray correctly observes that the few musical scenes we are given are unsatisfying. It is …

Japanese Branch Report- 2008, Miwa Ota

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On Saturday 29 November 2008, the twelfth Annual Convention of the George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at Kinki University.

The morning session began with an opening remark by Yosie Abe (Shoin University), followed by a welcome address by Itsuyo Shimizu (Kinki University). In the morning, we had three papers presented. The first two papers were introduced and commented upon by Chizuko Watari (Kanasai Gaidai University), and the third by Keiji Yata (Tokyo Kasei University). The first paper was 'Maggie's Struggle in The Mill on the Floss' by Muneaki Shinoda (the Graduate School of Osaka City University). He drew …

Review Of Private Sphere To World Stage From Austen To Eliot, Elizabeth Sabiston

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Elizabeth Sabiston's Private Sphere to World Stage from Austen to Eliot is a somewhat perplexing book. Ostensibly, Sabiston sets out to contribute to ongoing discussions about the difficulties faced by nineteenth-century women writers, who 'were confronted with the dilemma of effecting an elision of public and private spheres' (2). The first three chapters, on Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, lane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights, argue that the central protagonist of each novel offers an image of confident female authorship. Anne Elliot is presented as a heroine who 'against all odds ... strives for autonomy' (36), Jane Eyre moves from making amateur …

'The Stream Of Human Thought And Deed' In 'Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story', Melissa Raines

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In George Eliot: The Emergent Self, Ruby Redinger explains that it was through the demands of authorship that the woman Marian Evans 'evolved into another self, her writing self', essentially becoming George Eliot. Literary biographies of George Eliot in the last few decades have all, to varying degrees, focused on this transformation of the woman into the author. When considering George Eliot's first work of fiction, I think it significant that it is during the writing of the second 'scene' of Scenes of Clerical Life, 'Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story', that Marian Evans first chose to write and sign a professional letter …

George Eliot And The Female Tradition: A Little-Known Source, Lorna J. Clark

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In an essay published in the Westminster Review in 1856, George Eliot delivered a scathing indictment of 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists' which (she claimed) lack verisimilitude, 'intellectual power' and 'moral qualities'. The skill of such a writer 'is in inverse proportion to her confident eloquence'; the picture of life that she draws is 'totally false'. Her motivation is merely 'the foolish vanity of wishing to appear in print' or 'busy idleness'. Finally, these hapless female novelists are likened to La Fontaine's ass. Not surprisingly, faced with such a sweeping condemnation, critics have found Eliot's relationship with gender issues and …

Idlers And Collaborators: Enter The Dog, Beryl Gray

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Both George Eliot and her older contemporary, Charles Dickens, introduced dogs into their fiction before introducing any into their homes. By the time Dickens was given the first of his many dogs he had invented Ponto, the sagacious pointer described by Jingle in The Pickwick Papers; Bull's-eye for Oliver Twist; and Jerry's performing dogs for The Old Curiosity Shop. Before George Eliot received her first dog - the Pug presented to her by her grateful publisher John Blackwood - the narrator of her first story, 'The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton', had justified in the following terms the …

Review Of Victorian Turns, Neovictorian Returns: Essays On Fiction And Culture, Penny Gay, Judith Johnston, Catherine Waters

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The inside of this volume offers exactly the pleasurable variety and range of interest promised by its outside (the beautifully reproduced cover image is Ernest Dudley Heath's Piccadilly Circus at Night, 1893). As its title suggests, the volume, divided into two sections, seeks to capture, in Part One, the diverse ways in which the Victorians explored in fiction the multiple 'turns' in new directions the age was taking, and, in Part Two, the imaginative updatings of these fictions, in literature, film and theatre, as well as in scholarship, in the burgeoning afterlife of Victorianism.

The editors note in their introduction …

Scenes Of Clerical Life: George Eliot's Own Version Of Conversion, Alain Jumeau

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Before the publication of Scenes of Clerical Life, few people would have thought that Miss Evans had all the qualities for writing fiction, or, what is more, that she would become a great novelist. She was in her late thirties when she came to fiction writing, although, at the approach of middle age, most novelists have already tried their hand at it. Yet, as she confessed in her Journal, when she started writing the first story of Scenes of Clerical Life, it marked a new beginning for her, because she had always dreamt of writing fiction: 'September 1856 made a …

Fantasies Of Gender And The Witch In Feminist Theory And Literature, Justyna Sempruch

Comparative Cultural Studies

In Fantasies of Gender and the Witch in Feminist Theory and Literature, Justyna Sempruch analyzes contemporary representations of the “witch” as a locus for the cultural negotiation of genders. Sempruch revisits some of the most prominent traits in past and current perceptions in feminist scholarship of exclusion and difference. She examines a selection of twentieth-century US American, Canadian, and European narratives to reveal the continued political relevance of metaphors sustained in the archetype of the “witch” widely thought to belong to pop-cultural or folkloristic formulations of the past. Through a critical rereading of the feminist texts engaging with these …

Bibliography Of Works By And About Imre Kertész, Nobel Laureate In Literature 2002, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

The Study Of Literature And Culture Online (Theory And Application), Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

History Of Ricl: Research Institute For Comparative Literature, University Of Alberta 1985-1999, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Review Of Felix Holt, The Radical, Michael Eaton, Lucy Bailey

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Felix Holt, with its large cast of characters, and above all with its notoriously complicated legal plot, presents a real challenge when adapting and reducing it for a three hour, serialized radio dramatization. Michael Eaton is to be congratulated on neatly simplifying the plot, by omitting Thomas Trounsem's sale of his rights to Durfey and the exchange of names between Bycliffe and Scaddon. Admittedly this left a few loose ends, and listeners might have been puzzled by the name Scaddon, mentioned without explanation, but on the whole the necessary simplification was skillfully done and the main plot threads made clear. …

Japanese Branch Report 2007, Maiko Ohtake

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The eleventh annual convention of the George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at Chuo University on Saturday 24 November 2007.

The morning session began with an opening address by Miwa Ohta (Chuo University). Four papers were presented in the morning; the first two were introduced and commented upon by Michiko Kurisu (Daito Bunka University), and the last two by Shigeko Tomita (Koshien University).

The first paper was titled 'Rethinking Adam Bede - Why Does No One Help Hetty?' by Mayumi Fujita (Kwansei Gakuin University). Starting with a question about the severe treatment of Hetty, Ms. Fujita examined the moral …

Editor's Notes

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Middlemarch has been in the public eye since our last issue: Erica Wagner's column in the Times for Saturday 13 October 2007 bore the heading 'How good is Middlemarch if you reread it? Better'; and on 24 May 2008 the Review section of the Saturday Guardian devoted two and- a half broadsheet pages to Zadie Smith's tribute to George Eliot, 'On Middlemarch'. We have recently received Josie Billington's new Reader's Guide to the novel, Eliot's 'Middlemarch' (Continuum, 2008). This will be reviewed in our next issue.

Another work just received - Elizabeth Sabiston's Private Sphere to World Stage from Austen …

Address At Wreath-Laying In The George Eliot Memorial Garden, Nuneaton 17 June 2007, Don Jones

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

As I reflected on 'famous sons and daughters of Nuneaton', I came up with a short list. George EliotlMary Anne Evans, Larry Grayson, Ken Loach.

George Eliot must have cut quite an unconventional figure in her day. Larry Grayson, that rather gentle comedian, was also quite an unconventional character. Then Ken Loach, perhaps not so controversial in his personal life, none the less often espousing unconventional causes through his films. Is it something about Nuneaton that those it throws up into the arms of fame should have something of the unconventional about them? - or at least an eye for …

Review Of Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction And Other Information Systems, Richard Menke

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Richard Menke's study draws illuminating connections between the development of literary realism and the revolutionary changes which the nineteenth century saw in methods of communication and information management. Innovations such as the Penny Post, the telegraph, photography and wireless communication all raise fundamental questions about the representation in media both of the material world and of human subjectivity and social interconnection. Menke's discussion of these provides the context in which he examines how novelists grapple with similar issues, and he thus offers fresh new ways of thinking about realism as a self-conscious representational practice and about how the novel form …

George Eliot's Poetry Of The Soul, Gregory Tate

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The poetic epigraph to Daniel Deranda, written by George Eliot herself, anticipates and encapsulates the novel's interest in the complex processes that make up human psychology:

Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul: There, 'mid the throngs of hurrying desires That trample on the dead to seize their spoil, Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible As exhalations laden with slow death, And o’r the fairest troop of captured joys Breathes pallid pestilence.

The epigraph describes psychological phenomena that will feature prominently throughout Daniel Deranda: the multiple and contradictory elements of individual character; the often self-defeating nature of human thought and …

Address At Celebration For Kathleen And Bill Adams, Jonathan Ouvry

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I'm ashamed to say that I didn't know of the existence of the George Eliot Fellowship until 1980, which was of course the great year of the stone-laying in Westminster Abbey. I can't remember how it came to be known that one of George Henry Lewes's great-great-grandsons just happened, conveniently, to have an office next door to the Abbey, but then I suppose that that is one of the many secrets of Kathleen's success in her role as Secretary of the Fellowship - she was very good at finding out useful connections and unlikely information in the highways and byways …

George Eliot Birthday Luncheon, 25 November 2007- The Toast To The Immortal Memory, Roger Simmonds

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am extremely grateful to you for inviting me here today to give this speech on George Eliot's Birthday. It is a real pleasure and very flattering: I hope I can live up to expectations.

If you had told me a year ago that I would be standing before you all now as Project Officer for the 150th anniversary celebrations of George Eliot's first work of fiction, I would have been surprised to say the least! For somebody who values literature as much as I do, who greatly admires the work of George Eliot, and who loves …

Review Of The Spanish Gypsy By George Eliot, Antonie Gerard Van Den Broek

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This edition complements the two volume edition of The Complete Shorter Poetry of George Eliot, also edited by Antonie Gerard van den Broek and published by Pickering and Chatto in 2005. Like those volumes it presents an edited text and a mass of information, editorial, critical and contextual (the list of textual variants alone occupies about 120 pages). These volumes make an essential reference point for future discussion of the poem. William Baker's Preface describes its conception, progress and reception, and van den Broek's Introduction takes up in more detail the critical and conceptual contexts. There are four appendices. The …

Review Of The Cambridge Introduction To George Eliot, Nancy Henry

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This lively book is part of a new Cambridge University Press series already more than thirty titles strong, for 'readers who want to broaden their understanding of the books and authors they enjoy' - a mission statement which is quickly decoded: 'Ideal for students, teachers and lecturers'. The range of authors and topics included is canonical yet catholic, and not exclusively Anglophone: American authors are well represented along with English and Irish ones, there is a clutch of drama and theatre titles, Francophone literature and Derrida, postcolonial literatures and Modernism. The books are relatively short at about 60,000 words, and …

'Acting Out' In Daniel Deronda, Toni Griffiths

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This short paper illustrates the way in which psychoanalytic perspectives can help us to understand the effect which a complex literary text like Daniel Deronda has on the reader. The two psychoanalytic perspectives used are Freud's insights into the way dreams work, and Melanie Klein's exploration of the nature and importance of the unconscious phantasies of very early childhood and her discovery of the early developmental 'positions'. 1 These insights help to explain how what may appear puzzling and difficult in a novel nevertheless holds and moves its readers.

Freud's insights into the meaning and form of dreams2 suggest that …

Review Of Jeanie, An 'Army Of One': Mrs Nassau Senior, 1828-1877, The First Woman In Whitehall, Sybil Oldfield

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Sybil Oldfield is well-known for her work on humanitarian women, creative philanthropists and pacifists, and her new book is an important contribution to Victorian studies, a life-story told with admiration, sympathy and style, as cram-full of character and emotion as a novel, and of great interest to George Eliot scholars.

The neglect of Jeanie Senior, called Jeanie, pronounced Janie - her enthusiastic biographer puts 'sic' after deviations, eccentrically rather than pedantically since Jeanie was christened Jane Elizabeth and named Jane on her tomb and even in this book's index - is at first sight puzzling, because her ideals and zeal …

Review Of George Eliot, Jan Jedrzejewski

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The physical format of this important overview is unattractive, the print small, with some forty-eight lines to the page giving the impression of over packing to keep the cost down. This companion to George Eliot studies - it is in fact more than a guide - has a number of blemishes. Jedrzejewski has not been well served by his editor(s): he has been allowed some loosely inappropriate phrasing on occasions, as with Mary Ann's reaction to her father's death which 'made his departure obviously painful for her in emotional terms' (9). This hardly conveys the anguished outcry or poignant self-searchings …

Reflections On Scence Revisited: A Festival Celebrating The 150th Anniversary Of Scenes Of Clerical Life, John Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Members might be interested to read some reflections, several months on, of the Fellowship's involvement in the Nuneaton-based Scenes Revisited Festival which took place mostly during September 2007. One reason for this overview is that the Fellowship spent some £10,000 of its funds on the events throughout the year; another reason is that our involvement in a partnership helped to secure £50,000 from Heritage Lottery Fund to pay for a Project Officer and the many free events he was to coordinate.

There had been talk for two years among the group of history/museum/arts enthusiasts in Nuneaton and Bedworth, both local …

The Thirty-Sixth George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 2007: Scenes And After, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The Folio Society's cosmetic edition of George Eliot's fiction, which was published in 1999, has no place on any spine of its seven-volume set for Scenes of Clerical Life. A search of the actual texts, however, reveals George Eliot's first published fiction bedded together with Silas Marner, the pair sharing a neat introduction by Jill Paton-Walsh. I pondered at the time if spine exclusion meant that Scenes was just too minor for remark, or whether, as is the way with publishers, getting things wrong can be ignored once the books are on the shelves or, as with the Folio edition, …