Comparative Literature Commons^™

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 …

Walt Whitman And Civil War Washington, Kenneth M. Price

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Walt Whitman famously described his visits to thousands of wounded Civil War soldiers in Memoranda During the War, a volume with a largely ignored subtitle: "Written on the Spot in 1863-'65." I want to highlight that subtitle and its emphasis on space and time-its geo-temporal specificity-to ask what it meant to have a writer of Whitman's sensibilities thrust into the nation's capital city in the final three years of the war, when it had become a city of hospitals. More wounded soldiers were treated in Washington, DC, than in any other city, and Whitman, a visitor to dozens of hospitals, …

Clcweb: Comparative Literature And Culture, Gregory E. Rutledge

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In his article "Race, Slavery, and the Revaluation of the T'ang Canon" Gregory E. Rutledge re-evaluates—from the purview of African Diaspora literary studies—historiography that considers the place of East African slave lore in T'ang Dynasty fiction. Julie Wilensky's "The Magical Kunlun and 'Devil Slaves': Chinese Perceptions of Dark-skinned People and Africa before 1500" (2002), a revision of Chang Hsing-lang's "The Importation of Negro Slaves to China Under the T'ang Dynasty (A.D. 618- 907)" (1930), is pivotal since it occupies the nexus between European-American, East-Asian, and African-Diasporic canons and policies. Rutledge situates Wilensky's and Chang's works in the context of Edward …

Veiled Movements In The Vale Of Esthwaite, Jack Vespa

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The Vale of Esthwaite (1787), Wordsworth's first sustained effort at original composition, was first 1940 by Ernest De Selincourt in Poetical Works of Wordsworth as an example of the juvenilia. Among scholars who have treated the De Selincourt version of the poem, Geoffrey Hartman's account in Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814 is the fullest, which argues that The Vale of Esthwaite turns upon the mind of a poet enthralled by nature despite signs that his imagination may well be independent of nature (76-89). Other treatments of De Selincourt's edition appeared in F. W. Bateson, Paul Sheats, Thomas Weiskel, James Averill, Jonathan Wordsworth, …

Conference Report: Romola And Felix, Institute Of English Studies, 23 November 2013., A.G. Van Den Broek

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot's two Marmite novels - given their reputations, not everyone tries them, and when they do, they often leave them only partially digested - Romola (1862-3), the one she famously said aged her, and Felix Holt (1866), the one with that involved legal plot, were the focus of last year's George Eliot Conference sponsored by the Institute of English Studies at the University of London. Nevertheless, despite their uneven appeal, the Conference drew a tolerably-sized audience. Barbara Hardy (Birkbeck and Swansea) and Louise Lee (Roehampton) once again organized the Conference, bringing together a group of speakers who variously dealt …

Willa Cather, Edith Lewis, And Collaboration: The Southwestern Novels Of The 1920s And Beyond, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In Willa Cather: A Memoir, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant makes Edith Lewis, with whom Cather shared a home for nearly four decades, a relatively minor character in Cather’s life, and yet occasionally, Lewis moves to the forefront. Describing Cather’s “personal life” in the 1920s, Sergeant notes that when she visited their Five Bank Street apartment,

Edith Lewis, who now worked at the J. Walter Thompson Company, was always at dinner. One realized how much her companionship meant to Willa. A captain, as Will White of Emporia said … must have a first officer, who does a lot the captain never knows …

Review Of Janine Barchas, Matters Of Fact In Jane Austen: History, Location, And Celebrity, Laura White

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Janine Barchas’s thought-provoking study of Austen’s naming practices unearths a wealth of historical antecedents for Austen’s characters and posits an Austen whose gamesmanship with the names of persons and places rivals the knowingness and playfulness of James Joyce. In earlier decades, such a highly ambitious and wide-reaching work could not have been accomplished except through protracted antiquarian research. Web scholarship, however, has made it possible for Barchas to uncover in a relatively short time a remarkable array of the many interconnected historical figures bearing such names as Wentworth, Darcy, Vernon, Ferrars, Allen, and Dashwood whose heroic exploits, political machinations, tragic …

Intersections In Immanence: Spinoza, Deleuze, Negri, Abigail Lowe

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The connection between French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and Italian political theorist Antonio Negri has drawn attention in academic publications over the last decade. For both thinkers, the philosophical concept of immanence is central to how both respectively conceptualize the world. However, in order to consider their work with regard to a metaphysical grounding, one may benefit from turning to each thinker’s engagement with Jewish Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza whose immanent ontology, or monism, was indeed his Ethics. This essay concentrates on drawing out an ontological distinction between the philosophical projects of Deleuze and Negri by way of a close reading …

George Eliot's Brazilian Critical Fortune And The Case Of Romola, Jaqueline Bohn Donada

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I would like to begin this paper with a comment by Professor Felicia Bonaparte about George Eliot's novels. In an introductory reflection, she once observed that

We have found nothing yet that Eliot did not deliberately put in her novels; [ ... ]. Indeed, the fact is we have not yet read in these novels all that Eliot wrote. We have not yet, for example, looked carefully at what Eliot had to say about women in society. Eliot was a great feminist, and her novels, although they never stoop to mere propaganda, urge a relentless war against the conditions by …

'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 …

The Shape Of Catharine Sedgwick's Career, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Catharine Maria Sedgwick published her first novel in 1822 and her last in 1857. Her productivity slackened in the 1850S, as aging weakened her eyesight and arthritis made it difficult to write clearly. However, from 1822 through the 1840s, she published multiple works of prose fiction (tales, sketches, novellas, or novels) nearly every year. Despite this extraordinary record of productivity, Sedgwick regularly appears in literary history as the author of a single work, Hope Leslie (I827), her historical novel about relations between the Puritans and the native inhabitants of New England. A few other women authors before and contemporary with …

Revisiting History Through Crime Fiction: Shiono Nanami’S Scarlet Venice In The Renaissance Trilogy Of Murder, Ikuho Amano

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications

In her Renaissance Trilogy of Murder (1988), Shiono Nanami (塩野七生, 1937- ) rejuvenates the classical genre of historical crime fiction, dismantling a canonical outlook of late Renaissance Italy. As historiographer of Ancient Rome, the Italian Renaissance, and the Mediterranean naval epic, Shiono achieved literary stardom in Japan in the 1980s, and has been internationally known for her pragmatist approaches to history and contemporary politics. Her writing has reassessed established history from the non-Western and non-Christian viewpoints. Most notably, her magnum opus, Rōmajin no monogatari (Res GestaePopuli Romani—Tales of the Romans) (published 1992-2006) tirelessly describes the empire’s politics, beginning …

Knowing Too Much: The Burden Of Omniscience In The Lifted Veil, Melissa Raines

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In the spring of 1859, not long after the success of her first novel, Adam Bede, George Eliot submitted a much shorter work to her publisher, John Blackwood, for his consideration. Blackwood's eventual letter in response to the piece arrived more than a fortnight later and had to be prompted by Eliot's partner, George Henry Lewes. Perhaps Blackwood's belated reply was somewhat understandable: he must initially have been thrilled by the prospect of another submission from the rising new author, but the strangeness of this undeniably macabre new tale unsettled him. A story of supernatural power and science that pushed …