English Language and Literature Commons^™

Shakespeare's Twist: The Tragic Within Some Comedies, Susan Dettweiler Wilhide

Theses & Honors Papers

Shakespeare creatively intermingled comic and tragic motifs throughout each comedy. In doing so, the audience remembers the joyous reunions and unions rather than the potential tragedies of these plays. However, the comic portions are dependent upon the tragic portions and vice versa. The audience understands the tragic situations the characters face, yet laughs at the comic motifs causing these occurrences. The audience also shares in the joy of the characters as everything works out positively in the end.

Review Of The Lifted Veil, Tim Heath

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It was perhaps Herbert Spencer in his Autobiography (1904) who first disseminated the myth that, though George Eliot will remain for posterity one of our finest novelists, her weakness was that she could not construct effective, dramatic plots. By implication, her stories would thus not be effective on the stage, without the commentary of her wise, omniscient narrator. Perhaps in consequence there have been fewer dramatic adaptations of George Eliot's work than those of other nineteenth-century novelists, including Jane Austen and Dickens - this despite, amongst others, an extremely distinguished silent film based on Romola, starring Lillian Gish, in 1924. …

Address Of Wreath-Laying In Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey 20 June 2002, Margaret Wolfit

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Dear George Eliot

You don't know me - but I have been a great admirer of yours for a long time now, since I was at school in fact. I must have been very young when I first had parts of your novels read to me. Later when I was at boarding school I studied Silas Mamer for a literature exam - I can't recall my reaction to other authors at the time - but I know I wrote a letter home saying I thought George Eliot must be a wonderful person because my mother kept the letter.

After leaving …

Review Of Lives Of Victorian Literary Figures I, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ralph Pite, Gail Marshall, Corinna Russell, Matthew Bevis

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Like Pickering and Chatto's Lives of the Great Romantics, these volumes, each one devoted to a major Victorian writer, offer a collection of facsimile reproductions of 19th or early 20th century essays, reviews and extracts from memoirs and biographies with the emphasis, according to Ralph Pite's 'General Introduction', on material hard to find outside copyright libraries. Each volume contains a thoughtful and illuminating introduction; pithy but highly informative headnotes to each item, outlining the personal relationship (if any) and general attitude of its author towards Eliot, Dickens or Tennyson and in the process attuning our ears to the sound of …

Japanese Branch Report, Itsuyo Shimizu

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The sixth annual convention of the George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at Tezukayama University in an ancient city, Nara, on Saturday 30 November 2002. Before the opening, the members who arrived early enjoyed Romola (a silent film directed by Henry King, 1924) and opera music (arranged by Kiyoko Tsuda, a head official of the Japanese branch).

The morning session began with an opening address by Kiyoko Tsuda, a professor at Tezukayama University. In the morning, four members read their papers under the chairmanship of Professor Yoshiko Tanaka and Professor Shigeko Tomita.

The first paper, 'Women in Scenes of …

Review Of Lectures D'Une Amvre: George Eliot, 'The Mill On The Floss', Maria Tang

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot's novels have never been received in France with great enthusiasm. Translatiom have been relatively sparse, and it is still difficult to find more than one or two titles in Paris. even in the best academic bookshops, whereas Jane Austen's novels are widely read. Only a detailed reception history could reveal the reasons for this response, although it no doubt has something to do with the high Victorian tone and sentiments of George Eliot's writing, which would have fallen on deaf ears in late nineteenth-century France and a fortiori in the successive phases of twentieth-century modernism. The renewed interest …

Notes On Contributors 2003

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Kathleen Adams has been Secretary of the Fellowship since 1968. She initiated the Review in 1970, was editor until 1981 and co-editor 1982-91. She published Those of Us Who Loved Her in 1980 and A Community of Interest: The Story of the George Eliot Fellowship 1930-2000 in 2000.

Terence Cave is Emeritus Professor of French, Oxford University, and Emeritus Research Fellow, St John's College. He has edited the Penguin edition of Daniel Deronda (1995) and the Oxford World's Classics edition of Silas Marner (1996). He is the author of Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (1988) and numerous books and articles …

'The Mill On The Floss' And 'Silas Marner': New Casebooks, Nahem Yousaf, Andrew Maunder

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This collection of essays on two of George Eliot's most popular novels adds to the growing number of Casebooks produced by Palgrave. These are useful volumes, particularly for students, providing as they do a selection of recent critical perspectives. That said, I would have thought that The Mill on the Floss might have merited a volume all to itself; however the choice of essays contained herein provides some interesting links both within and across the two novels discussed.

In their Introduction, the editors comment that 'the essays reprinted in this New Casebook serve as a reminder of the dimensions of …

Toast To George Eliot Birthday Luncheon, 24 November 2002 The Toast To The Immortal Memory, Andrew Davies

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In November 2002, 'my' adaptation of Daniel Deronda finally reached the screen, on BBCl. The production had been anticipated for years, and many people must have wondered what made it take so long.

Middlemarch, in 1994, had been a great labour of love for all involved in the production, and was received so well that it's not an exaggeration to say that it revived the reputation of the Classic Serial, and the then sagging reputation of the BBC itself. I was keen to adapt more George Eliot, and the BBC were favourably inclined.

I had, shamefully, never read Daniel Deronda, …

Letter To The Secretary Of The Fellowship, David Mendel, Kent

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Dear Kathleen Adams

I am writing to say thank you very much for all the work which you continue to do on behalf of us punters. If I weren't 80 I would volunteer for some job myself to ease your load, but my get up and go has got up and ·is gone.

I was disappointed with Rosalind Miles 's Memorial Lecture. Having set up a pretty spurious list of straw men - and women - she spent the rest of the lecture proving what we all know anyway, which is that GE rises above all that.

In addition she …

Review Of Faithful Realism: Elizabeth Gaskell And Leo Tolstoy A Comparative Study, Josie Billington

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Who is the English novelist worthy of comparison with Tolstoy? The name of George Eliot immediately suggests itself, though even Middlemarch does not have the range of War and Peace. What Henry James said of Eliot - that she is 'also a good deal of a philosopher and it is to this union of the keenest observation with the ripest reflection that her style owes its essential force' - seems to apply to Tolstoy as well. F. R. Leavis, we recall, invoked the name of the Russian novelist in his appraisal of Eliot, arguing that the best parts of …

Review Of George Eliot, Music And Victorian Culture, Delia Da Sousa Correa

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Delia da Sousa Correa takes as starting point 'the yearning for spiritual expansion and sympathetic experience' so evident in George Eliot; and music, an 'undersong' to the desires of transcendence and affinity, is the prime concern in da Sousa Correa's exploration of its transformations in Eliot's fiction. To do this, da Sousa Correa explores a range of intellectual and cultural contexts for Eliot's work, though not all those her title's inclusive 'Victorian culture' might suggest. Da Sousa Correa acknowledges Beryl Gray's George Eliot and Music (1989) and rightly claims her approach differs fundamentally, the two studies being complementary. Da Sousa …

Annual Report 2002, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

2002 was, as always, a busy year, and the one in which we published our Pitkin Guide to George Eliot. This was something of a milestone for us as Pitkin Guides are so well known around the UK and it seemed right that George Eliot should be included in the vast number of Pitkin titles.

We held our Annual General Meeting on 15 March and re-elected, with great pleasure, our President, Jonathan Ouvry, for another three-year term. Jonathan is so supportive of everything we do. We had been again without a treasurer until Jill Bridgewater agreed to replace Sophie Pavier …

Review Of George Eliot A Bibliographical History, William Baker, John C. Ross

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This enormously impressive history is the fruit of something like thirty-five years of work by William Baker and John Ross. They have brought together a huge and comprehensive body of bibliographical information, broken down into five main sections and two appenctixes. There are extensive entries and notes on the major works; minor literary works (novellas and poetry); essays and reviews; miscellaneous writing (unpublished works in publishable genres, compilations of short extracts, partly authored writings, unpublished autobiographical writings); collections and collected works (more poetry, essays, novels and complete works); and 'Eliotiana' (sequels, settings for songs from The Spanish Gypsy, collections of …

Review Of George Eliot And Schiller: Intertextuality And Cross-Culural Discourse, Dutch Readings Of George Eliot, Deborah Guth, Deiderik L. Van Werven

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In their very different ways these two studies contribute significantly to our understanding of George Eliot's place in the wider context of European literary culture. Diederik van Werven examines the nineteenth-century reception of her novels in the Netherlands, thus filling in what is, for most of the English-speaking world, a blank space in the map of her contemporary reputation; while Deborah Guth reads her work through the lens provided by the well-known but relatively neglected Schiller, who was the fust German writer to arouse her enthusiasm, but who was later supplanted, both in her own life and in subsequent critical …

Commemorative Occasions In 2002, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The George Eliot Memorial Garden in Nuneaton reached its half century in May 2002. In 1930 several literary men, amongst them George Bernard Shaw, were asked if Nuneaton should erect a memorial to George Eliot. Most of them expressed astonishment that one was not already in existence. They may have been even more amazed to discover that it would be another twenty-two years before one appeared, for it was not until 1952 that the George Eliot Memorial Garden was established.

The Newdegate family at Arbury Hall was one step ahead of Nuneaton as an obelisk had already been erected by …

The Thirty-First George Eliot Memorial Lecture; Jane Austen And George Eliot: Afterlives And Letters, Joanne Shattock

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

'A woman and her book are identical' - or so the American writer Edgar Allen Poe reflected when reading an early collection of poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.' Remembering the autobiographical nature of much of Barrett Browning's early work, his comment is not surprising. But it has a more general relevance for nineteenth-century women writers. The charge that they could only write of what they knew, and that what they knew best was themselves, was made regularly by reviewers. The easy association of the life and the work, or more accurately, a refusal to separate them, was crucial to the …

Address At Wreath-Laying In The George Eliot Memorial Garden, Nuneaton 30 June 2002, Jonathan G. Ouvry

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I thought that I would talk today about a previously unexplored topic - George Eliot and cats. Unfortunately, I find that the reason why the topic is previously unexplored is that George Eliot, unlike the other Eliot, had very little, or possibly nothing, to say about cats. There may have been the odd un-named farm cat lurking about in Adam Bede, but nothing on which one could construct a ten-minute talk in the open air.

Dogs, of course, are quite another story, both real and fictional. There was Pug, a present from John Blackwood, sadly lost after only eighteen months, …

George Eliot: Elegies And Eulogies, Margaret Harris

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The death of George Eliot on 22 December 1880 occasioned many prose obituaries and also a number of verse tributes.' I have located eleven of these in all, along with a twelfth poem published in her lifetime: nine poets are represented, of whom four are women and five men (assuming J. S. Dawson and 'K. G.' to be male). Together, the poems provide a sidelight on her reputation. Elegy frequently mourns dead poets and establishes poetic genealogies: while George Eliot's fame depends on her fiction rather than her poetry, her eminence in letters as well as her moral and intellectual …

Review Of Middlemarch, Margret Stevens, Annelies Roeleveld

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The recent appearance of a Dutch translation of Middlemarch, in a prestigious series of classics by a leading publishing house, may well be considered as constituting 'cultural justice', and it is justice long overdue. Ever since the mid-nineteenth century, there has been a flourishing market for English literature in the Netherlands, in the original as well as in translation. Of recent years, publishing practice has been carefully to coordinate publication of translations with that of English editions, for once an English novel is available, there is hardly a market for translations. That makes it even more remarkable that there is …

Comic George Eliot, George Scott Christian

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot's famous digression on the nature of literary realism in chapter 17 of Adam Bede has long been understood as a kind of aesthetic manifesto for the Victorian novel. Much has been written on Eliot's insistence that a faithful narrative representation of reality must take account of low and middle life, much as Dutch genre painting seeks to imitate quotidian life in all its prosaic detail. What has attracted virtually no attention in discussions of Eliot's ideas on realism, however, is the central importance of comic theory to her realist aesthetic.' Indeed, Eliot's comic theory deeply informs and shapes …

William Blake: An Integrated Teaching Approach, Shawn C. Gaspaire

All Graduate Projects

The purpose of this project was to explore the usefulness of providing integrated curricula in today's contemporary classroom. The literature review illustrates that integrated approaches to teaching improve classroom engagement rates, retention, and skill level across grade levels when compared to non-integrated environments. A tenweek model using William Blake as a catalyst is presented. The integrated approach using Blake incorporates history, English, the arts, vocational arts, communication, and the technologies. Implications of integrated curriculum and William Blake are discussed.

Formulating Fantasies: Marriage In Victorian England And George Eliot's Middlemarch, Liza Welch Barnes

Theses and Dissertations

One of the oldest states of existence known to humanity, marriage is a traditional state of being, uniting one man and one woman to love, honor, cherish, and protect each other for the rest of their lives. In Victorian England, however, many men and women questioned traditional expectations concerning marriage. Society's norms in Britain dictated that marriage was the ultimate goal in the nineteenth century, and, according to Barbara Weiss, "there has perhaps never been an age (or a literature) as relentlessly pro marriage as the Victorian period" (67).

However, many issues concerning marriage disturbed some freer-thinking Victorians, including novelist …

Sexual Slander And Working Women In "The Roaring Girl", Mario Digangi

Publications and Research

Though scholarship of the early modern era focuses on the character of Moll Frith when considering the gender ideology contained in Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's "The Roaring Girl," the play's other female characters are also of interest. The "citizen wives" of the play are women who, though married, work outside the home. Their special status in the emerging capitalist marketplace of the early modern era gave rise to unique anxieties about their economic power and sexual availability. These anxieties in turn made these women especially susceptible to slander against their sexual reputation and thus respectability in the community. An …

Prophecy And Anti-Popery In Victorian London: John Cumming Reconsidered, Robert Ellison, Carol Herringer

English Faculty Research

John Cumming (1807-1881) was the popular minister of the Crown Court Church of Scotland in London's Covent Garden. This article examines his views on the end times and the Roman Catholic Church, two of the favorite subjects of his preaching.

The Oswald Review Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 5 Fall 2003

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Mermaid's Dress: Marriage And Empire In The Voyage Out And Mrs Dalloway, Melissa Wharton-Smith

Masters Theses

This thesis examines how socio-historical influences shape the protagonists of Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915) and Mrs. Dalloway (1925)-- Rachel Vinrace and Clarissa Dalloway. During the writing of these two novels, attitudes about roles for women before and after World War I shifted as pre-war domestic strife was replaced by a post-war push to return to normalcy. Throughout the period, imperialist ideology demanded that women conform to traditional gender roles by marrying and reproducing. Woolf depicts this pressure as it affects her two protagonists.

In The Voyage Out, the British Empire's imposing presence is exhibited through the setting of …

Facade Of A Romantic: Benjamin Disraeli And Coningsby Or The New Generation, Sybil Or The Two Nations, And Tancred Or The New Crusade, Peggy Pope

Masters Theses

Dismissed by contemporary critics as a second-rate writer, Benjamin Disraeli has been undervalued for over a hundred and fifty years. Writing in 1979, D.R. Schwarz rued that no recent full-length study of his novels had been undertaken, while other, even more minor novelists have been regularly exhumed. A substantial reassessment may be underway, as Paul Smith notes, particularly in the area of Disraeli's Jewishness. Bernard Glassman's volume, Benjamin Disraeli: The Fabricated Jew in Myth and Memory (2003), and Disraeli's Jewishness (2002), by Todd Endelman and Tony Kushner, attest to this new interest. A recent general study, Disraeli (2000), by Edgar …

Clark Memorandum: Fall 2002, J. Reuben Clark Law Society, J. Reuben Clark Law School

The Clark Memorandum

• A Song of Redemption (Richard G. Wilkins)
• Lawyers Who Made a Difference in My Life (H. Reese Hansen)
• Knowing God by Receiving Him in the World (Randall Huff)
• Become Deliverers (Elder James E. Faust)
• The Lawyer as Composer (Brett G. Scharffs)

Review Of Conrad And Masculinity, Richard Ruppel

English Faculty Articles and Research

A review of Andrew Michael Roberts' Conrad and Masculinity.