Comparative Literature Commons^™

The Idea Of An English Gentleman: Mr. Knightley And Arthur Donnithorne, David Ball

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

My modest purpose in this essay is to develop the interesting suggestion of Ellen Moers in Literary Women that George Eliot's inspiration to write Adam Bede may well have lain in her attentive reading of Emma: that Adam Bede himself is the heroic and detailed portrait of Robert Martin that Emma has no place for. George Eliot's father, Robert Evans, was a mari similar to Robert Martin and Adam Bede, in both status and ability, and the creation of Adam is Eliot's first fictional tribute to him. Ellen Moers also briefly compares Harriet Smith and Hetty Sorrel as sharing 'the …

The George Eliot Review: Journal Of The George Eliot Fellowship 1998 No. 29, Beryl Gray, John Rignall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

CONTENTS

Notes on Contributors ...................................................................................... 5

REPORTS Kathleen Adams: Annual Report 1997 ........................................... 7

Shoshana Milgram Knapp: American Branch Report.................................... 14

ADDRESSES Ruth Harris: Address at the wreath-laying in the George Eliot Memorial Garden, 15 June 1997 ................................................. 15

Carol A. Martin: Address at the wreath-laying in Westminster Abbey, 21 June 1997 .......................................................................... 18

Gillian Beer: The Twenty-Sixth George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 11 October 1997................................................ 24

Geoffrey Beevers: The Toast to the Immortal Memory: George Eliot Birthday Luncheon, 23 November 1997........................................ .30

ARTICLES David Malcolm: 'Grand and Vague': Why is Daniel Deronda about the Jews? (Prize-winning Essay)................................................................................ .33

David Bell: …

Wordsworth And The Victorians, Stephen Gill

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Words worth belongs to a generation that re-invented posterity as the true judge of artistic worth, a truth beyond fashion and faction, the eternal justification of a misunderstood life. His exact contemporary Holderlin asked 'Wozu Dichter in diirftiger Zeit, meaning, among other things, why be a poet in an age that does not know how to value poetry? Romantic poets invested very heavily in the future, and for that reason, leaving aside others, their reception makes a fascinating study, full of veneration, misprision, irony, bathos, creative imitation and unconscious symbiosis.

Stephen Gill's book IS about both the Victorianization of Words …

Baraba Leigh-Smith Bodichon: Feminist, Artist And Rebel, Pam Hirsch

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It is impossible not to be impressed by Barbara Leigh-Smith Bodichon. Her life is interesting for its diversity, rather than for any single accomplishment, and therefore she has posed a challenge for biographers. Most accounts of Bodichon, such as Sheila Hemstein's A Mid- Victorian Feminist: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1985) and Candida Ann Lacey's collection, Barbara Bodichon and the Langham Place Group (1987), have focused on her activities as a social reformer. The first complete biography since Hester Burton's Barbara Bodichon, 1827- 1891 (1949), is Pam Hirsch's Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon: Feminist, Artist and Rebel. Hirsch recognizes the relative neglect …

A Note Of Daniel Deronda's Circumcision, Derek Miller

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

For the last twenty years or so critics have wondered if Daniel Deronda, the eponymous hero of George Eliot's last novel, was circumcised or not. If he was, he would scarcely have to wait for his mother's revelations to know he was a Jew. Some commentators, however, say that, for medical reasons, circumcision was not uncommon among middle class people at the time of Deronda's infancy, and he might therefore not have given much attention to the matter.

Professor John Sutherland, recently entering this lively discussion! points to the rebellion by Deronda's mother against her father's Judaism as a prime …

Gwendolen's Story From Daniel Deronda, Gabriel Woolf, Rosalind Shanks

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In 1902, the essayist, Leslie Stephen, wrote that Daniel Deronda was 'two stories put side by side' and the 'Gwendolen Story' taken by itself was a 'masterly piece of social satire'. In his biography of George Eliot, Gordon Haight makes a general reference to 'Gwendolen's story' as part of the whole narrative of Daniel Deronda including the Jewish portion. He showed some disdain towards 'careless readers' who thought the Jewish elements could be separated from the story of Gwendolen.

George Eliot herself, writing to Barbara Bodichon, seemed displeased with readers who 'cut the book up into scraps and talk of …

American Branch Report 1997, Shoshanan Milgram Knapp

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The eighth annual MLA dinner, a typically informal and festive occasion, was held at the Ristorante Amalfi in Toronto on Sunday, 28 December 1997. Present were Michael Ballin, Margaret Barfield, Nancy Cervetti, Connie Fulmer, Bonnie Gerard, Gabe Gerard, Shoshana Milgram Knapp, and Richard Maxwell. Shoshana conveyed greetings from Linda Robertson, the new coordinator of the American branch, and from Kathleen Adams.

Review Of Sisters In Literature: Female Sexuality In 'Antigone', 'Middlemarch', 'Howard's End' And 'Women In Love', Masako Hirai

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

While the main theme of this book is clear and easily grasped, there is an unevenness about the treatment which at times is disconcerting. Biography and critical argument sit uneasily together, some of the statements are outside the frame of current criticism, and there are some subjective and questionable assertions. Take this about the relationship between George Henry Lewes and George Eliot: 'Yet even Lewes, I think, was more superficial (sometimes even disloyal) than her nature demanded, having a journalistic rather than an academic mind, and taking a broad interest in everything. Understandably, he could not share her deepest struggle, …

The Stereotyped Edition's Title-Page Vignettes, Beryle Gray

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On 2 November 1866, George Eliot wrote to John Blackwood approving of his proposal to publish an illustrated edition of her books. The project, she saw, was

a wise one, as likely to assist in [the books'] circulation. In the abstract I object to illustrated literature, but abstract theories of publishing can no more be carried out than abstract theories of politics.'

B1ackwood's idea developed into a plan 'to try the cheap illustrated edition of your Novels in six penny numbers of which Adam, The Mill, Scenes, Silas, and Felix would make 30, ultimately to form four volumes selling at …

'Hardy And Eliot': A Response, Toru Sasaki

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In the last issue of the Review, Nicola Harris, in her Fellowship Prize Essay, discussed the different attitudes of Hardy and George Eliot to 'moral perception'.' In the course of her argument she refers to an article of mine, published several years ago, where I dealt with the same passages that she considers. Having read her piece with great interest, I should like to make the following observations.

The reference to what I said occurs where Harris is comparing the description of Boldwood looking fixedly at the Valentine that Bathsheba has sent him (,Here the bachelor's gaze was continually fastening …

Annual Report 1988

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The year began, as always. with the Annual General Meeting on March 25th. The four officers were re-elected and Daphne Paton was welcomed to the Fellowship Council. Joan Bunn was re-elected and both ladies have proved very supportive throughout the year. The business meeting was followed by a showing of slides of North Warwickshire then and now - a fascinating collection by John Burton, Chairman of the Bedworth Society, and to show our appreciation we made a donation to the Society's appeal fund to save the Pump House at the Nicholas Chamberlaine Almshouses in Bedworth.

The second event was almost …

Review Of From Author To Text: Re-Reading George Eliot's Romola; George Eliot And Italy: Literary, Cultural And Politcal Influences From Dante To The Risorgimento, Caroline Levine, Mark W. Turner, Andrew Thomspon

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Each of these books took me by surprise. There is a curious tension between the incorporativeness of Andrew Thompson's title, George Eliot and Italy, and his compendiously specific sub-title, Literary, Cultural and Political Influences from Dante to the Risorgimento, which somehow led me to expect something like a descriptive catalogue of alleged influences. Instead, I found a book which indeed has awkwardnesses, but which pursues an argument and offers valuable illumination of George Eliot's whole career (and not just Romola, as might easily be assumed). Barbara Hardy memorably observed in 1959 that 'Romola is undoubtedly a book which it is …

"Grand And Vague" Why Is Daniel Deronda About The Jews?, David Malcolm

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

'I am sure you are right to leave everything grand and vague', George Eliot's publisher wrote bemusedly to her about Daniel Deronda's Zionism (Letters VI: 272). In his 'Conversation' on Daniel Deronda, Henry James too, like many contemporary and later readers, expresses his doubt and unease about the novel's Zionist subject matter.

Traditional interpretations of the Zionist subject matter in Daniel Deronda are not wholly satisfactory. It is often dismissed as vague and lacking in concreteness (Fisher 227; Bamber 421; Hochman 113-33; LiddellI82), or explained purely in biographical terms, which, while fascinating, do not reveal much about the function of …

Japanese Branch Report 1998, Yuriko Kani

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The second annual convention of the George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at Toyo University in Tokyo on Saturday, 31 October 1998. After a year of careful preparation, the convention was successful. The morning session began with a welcome speech by Yuzo Uzuhashi, Chair of the English Literature Department at Toyo University. After that, three papers were presented. The first paper, 'Representations of Mobs and Riots: Felix Halt as an Industrial Novel', was presented by Tadashi Wada, a graduate student at Tokyo University. He discussed how the author's ambivalent view of mobs and riots was reflected in the representations …

Review Of A Monument To The Memory Of George Eliot. Edith J. Simcox's Autobiography Of A Shirtmaker, Constance M. Fulmer, Margaret E. Barfield

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The intensity of Edith Jemima Simcox's passion for George Eliot has been known to a twentieth- century reading public since the publication of K. A. McKenzie's Edith Simcox and George Eliot in 1961. McKenzie's book is a combination of summary and quotation of a manuscript acquired by the Bodleian Library in 1958, This manuscript, entitled The Autobiography of a Shirtmaker, is a journal kept by Simcox from 10 May 1876 until 29 January 1900. Gordon Haight wrote the introduction to McKenzie's book, relied on the Simcox manuscript in his 1968 biography of Eliot, and printed lengthy passages from it in …

Review Silas Marner, Geoffrey Beevers

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Following on from his extremely successful stage adaptation of Adam Bede, which won a Time Out award in 1991, Geoffrey Beevers chose to bring another George Eliot masterpiece, Silas Mamer, to the stage at the Orange Tree theatre.

With four stage exit and entry points, this theatre-in-the-round offered a perfect opportunity to create the pace required to move through a tale spanning thirty years in the confines of a two and- a-half-hour play. The cast took full advantage, with actors narrating from all corners while the scene developed centre stage, giving the audience no time to lose the thread.

Narration …

Mathilde Blind, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The first titles in the Eminent Women Series published in 1883 by W. H. Allen included studies of Emily Bronte and George Sand (Margaret Fuller, Maria Edgeworth, Elizabeth Fry, and Harriet Martineau would be in the next wave) as well as Mathilde Blind's pioneering, sensitive, uneven and sympathetically feminist exposition of George Eliot's life and art. Blind herself deserves a full-length study, and at particular points her own life and works touch those of George Eliot. Born Mathilde Cohen in Mannheim in 1841, she took her stepfather's name when her mother remarried. Dr. Karl Blind was an ardent republican in …

The Twenty-Sixth George Eliot Memorial Lecture: A Troubled Friendship, Gillian Beer

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Edith Simcox is now usually remembered, if at all, as the woman who recorded in a secret journal ('Autobiography of a Shirt Maker') her passionate and physically unrequited love for George Eliot. Yet to her contemporaries Simcox was well known as a philosopher, a distinguished translator of intellectual works from German, an incisive journalist reviewing important works written in French and German as well as English, an ethnographer, and a political activist. She was, under the pen-name 'H. Lawrenny' one of the founding contributors to the Academy in 1869 and appeared for the first time in her own person there …

'My Own Dear Heart's Ease': George Eliot's Coventry Friend, Caroline (Cara) Bray (1814-1905), Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In September 1842 Mary Ann Evans wrote a short but illuminating letter to her Coventry friend Cara Bray:

My own dear Heart's Ease [it was not unusual for her to give her closest friends the name of a flower as she had done this on several occasions before], ... your looks and words of love are so precious to me. I am together ashamed of myself - do not tell anyone that I am so silly as I appear to her whom I love best ... '

We don't know why Mary Ann was so ashamed but we do see …

Review Of George Eliot And Goethe: An Elective Affinity Sisters In Literature: Female Sexuality In 'Antigone', 'Middlemarch,' 'Howards End' And 'Women In Love', Gerlinde Roder-Bolton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot's admiration for Goethe is well known but how exactly it impinges on her own fiction is less clear and hence Gerlinde Roder-Bolton's useful attempt to analyse her creative use of him. As the sub-title of this study is perhaps intended to suggest, however, it either combines, or slips between, two different arguments. It looks closely at three parallel texts: The Mill on the Floss and Elective Affinities; Daniel Deronda and Faust; Daniel Deronda and Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. In the first case, evidence is adduced, along with an interpretative argument, to suggest that Goethe's novel significantly aided the composition …

Building The Imagined Community: Dominican Exempla And Theological Knowledge, Andrea L. Winkler

Quidditas

During the thirteenth century, preachers considered sermons to be among the most important methods of communicating written material to the unlettered. Within a sermon, the use of exempla—short stories used to illustrate a moral point—was a primary means of disseminating theological information, and throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the number of exempla compilations intended as preaching aids increased markedly. Exempla collectors such as Caesarius of Heisterbach and Stephen of Bourbon shared and re-used stories to disseminate theological knowledge. Despite the communal nature of exempla, individual stories were more than unidirectional theological transmissions or stock tales repeated with …

John Skelton's "Agenst Garnesche": Poetic Territorialism, At The Court Of Henry Viii, Victor I. Scherb

Quidditas

John Skelton's 1514 flyting "Agenst Garnesche" has been subject to little critical scrutiny. This neglect can perhaps be attributed to the fact that Christopher Garnesche's contribution is missing, but it is also characteristic of the relative neglect accorded to the flyting as a genre, a neglect that has also colored the interpretation of many of Skelton's more abusive poems. One critic, for example, has dismissed the poem as being "nothing but personal abuse of a particularly virulent type . . . adorned with a singular collection of epithets and incomprehensible allusions, which serve only to befog and irritate the reader." …

Objects Of Desire: Reading The Material World Metaphysically In Marguerite De Navarre's Heptaméron, Catharine Randall

Quidditas

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth,

where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.

But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven,

where moth and rust do not destroy,

and where thieves do not break in and steal.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

(Matthew 6:19-21)

Review Essay: Williams, Gary Jay. Our Moonlight Revels: "A Midsummer Night's Dream" In The Theatre. Studies In Theatre History And Culture Series, Lois Potter

Quidditas

Williams, Gary Jay. Our Moonlight Revels: "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the Theatare. Studies in Theatre History and Culture Series, ed. Thomas Postlewait, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 1997. 340 pp. $39.95. ISBN 0-877-45592-9.

Warren's Audubon: A Vision Revisited, Sylwia W. Zechowska

Masters Theses

This thesis consists of a Polish translation of a volume of Robert Penn Warren's poetry: Audubon: A Vision accompanied by an introductory essay focusing on historical, cultural and psychological aspects of the poems. As a novelist, Robert Penn Warren is well known to the Polish reading public. All his major novels have been translated into Polish and received with great acclaim, which has been confirmed by numerous editions. Warren's popularity among Polish readers may be attributed to the fact that his fiction is permeated with a peculiar sense of melancholy and a profound awareness of tragic national history, features inevitably …

Review Of Ruth Finnegan's Oral Traditions And The Verbal Arts: A Guide To Research Practices, Chukwuma Azuonye

Africana Studies Faculty Publication Series

Review of Ruth Finnegan's Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts: A Guide to Research Practices. (ASA Research Methods in Social Anthropology Series, no. 4.) xviii, 284pp. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.

Mao Chen. Between Tradition And Change : The Hermeneutics Of May Fourth Literature, Sarah E. Stevens

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

This article reviews the book "Between Tradition and Change: The Hermeneutics of May Fourth Literature", written by Mao Chen.

Romantic Agonies: Human Suffering And The Ethical Sublime, Anthony P. Russell, Terryl Givens

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

This essay examines two poems depicting human anguish in order to explore a current in Romantic thought that implicitly yields some original and compelling insights regarding the problematic relationship between art and suffering. The focus is primarily on Wordsworth's narrative of Margaret's suffering in The Excursion, then more briefly on Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. In both cases Kant's ideas about the sublime provide us with a useful perspective from which to understand the issues these poems raise.

頹廢文化的遺留 : 關於穆時英小說中頹廢女人的形象和意象, Jin Li

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

No abstract provided.

革命陣營的內部論爭? : 分析1928年革命文學論爭魯迅成為攻擊目標的原因, Wang Chi Wong

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

1928年爆發的“革命文學”論爭，在中國現代文學史和政治史上都有巨大的意義和深遠的影響。它標誌了左翼作家直接參與、干預以至控制現代中國文壇的開始。毛澤東便曾經高度評價過這時期在文化戰線上取得的勝利，這說明了為甚麼“革命文學論爭”在大陸出版的文學史著作及研究中佔了這樣重要的地位。

正由於這個緣故，有關“革命文學論爭”的論述為數不少，但因為政治及意識形態的原因，很多研究文章不但不能解決問題，而且往往引起新的爭論，所以“革命文學論爭”還是有值得深入探究的地方。本文會集中討論一個問題：為甚麼魯迅會成為革命文學派的攻擊目標？