English Language and Literature Commons^™

Orts 44, 1997, The George Macdonald Society

Orts: The George MacDonald Society Newsletter

The Annual General Meeting of the Society will be held at St Stephen's Church, Westbourne Park Road, London W2 on Friday October 31st at 7.15pm. for 7.30. St Stephen's is near the eastern end of Westbourne Park Road, a few hundred yards from Royal Oak Stn., which is on the Hammersmith and City Line. Turn left out of the station and Westbourne Park Road is the second turning on the right.

Orts 45, 1997, The George Macdonald Society

Orts: The George MacDonald Society Newsletter

Various unexpected events have delayed the final planning of this Conference. As a consequence it has not yet been possible to circulate full details. However the Conference is still planned to take place at Westminster College, Oxford from June 26th-28th.

Orts 42, 1997, The George Macdonald Society

Orts: The George MacDonald Society Newsletter

The extent to which email and the internet, in the past year, have supplanted the traditional forms of communication at a distance, is almost beyond belief. Few of us had realised how our specialist interests can blossom when a form of world-wide communication becomes available which reproduces the situation in a neighbourhood special-interest club, where members communicate informally with one another several times a week. The MacDonald Society's web site has not yet started to flourish, but that is only because J. J. Flynn who manages it, has been seriously ill. We wish him a speedy recovery. There is, however …

Orts 43, 1997, The George Macdonald Society

Orts: The George MacDonald Society Newsletter

We have attempted to catch up on our publishing schedules. This issue is only one month late and number 44 should be on time. The brief period since Orts 42 however has meant that we have received few contributions, and the issue lacks the 'lighter' material necessary to balance two serious reviews. Please be sure to send us any material you have for the next issue.

Christina Rossetti: Pre-Raphaelite Poet, Linda S. Baird

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Considered by her contemporaries to be one of Victorian England's greatest poets, the writings of Christina Rossetti clearly exemplify the work of a Pre-Raphaelite artist ("CR and the Visual Arts"). The publication in 1862 of Goblin Market and Other Poems represented the first literary success of the Pre-Raphaelites, although Christina herself was not a bona fide member ("CR's Literary Career"). Much speculation exists as to the reason that the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Several biographers/critics postulate that some of the members refused to allow her admittance because she was female; however, an actual letter from Gabriel suggests that she was asked, but …

New Wine In Old Kings: British Wine Bottle Names And The Old Testament, Steven W. Holloway

Libraries

No abstract provided.

'Judith' And The Rhetoric Of Heroism In Anglo‐Saxon England, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

The Old English Judith differs from the Liber Judith of the Vulgate at several crucial points, and in one particularly important way. In the Vulgate version of the story, Judith is a heroine in every sense of the word: she is a tropological symbol of Chastity at battle with Licentiousness, an allegorical symbol of the Church in its constant and eventually triumphant battle with Satan, and an inspirational figure who infuses her warriors with much needed courage and confidence; but the Vulgate Judith is also, in a very real sense, the agent by which God's will is executed and the …

The Ideolody Of Imagination: Subject And Society In The Discourse Of Romanticism, Forest Pyle

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

A first reaction to the title of this book might be to wonder that it has apparently not been used before: ideology, imagination, subject, society, discourse, Romanticism - a compendium of weighty terms elegantly linked. Another might be to sigh at their familiarity and abstraction: are we in for a strenuously theoretical restatement of some well-worn themes? Readers of George Eliot might have a third reaction: is this a book about Romanticism with a chapter about Eliot tacked on at the end? To answer all these questions simply, let me say that this is a valuable book and recommend it …

Review Of Holt The Radical, A.G. Van Den Broek, Linda Mugglestone

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

With Romola, Felix Halt, the Radical has generally proved to be George Eliot's least appreciated novel. Romola used to be safely categorized as 'smelling of the lamp', while Felix Halt was awkwardly 'political'. Despite a continuing critical unease about both novels, we cannot easily employ such easy categories at the end of the twentieth century. Indeed, the whole idea of what constitutes a 'political novel' has itself radically changed. Where unreconstructed Marxist and Marxisant critics used to see politics exclusively in terms of class struggle, and George Eliot as a muddied conservative whose intellectual grasp on political affairs would have …

Having The Whip-Hand In Middlemarch, Daniel Karlin

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In one of the first reviews of Proust's Du cote de chez Swann, appropriately published in the journal Le Temps, in 1913, the critic Paul Souday takes Proust to task for writing too much like an Englishman. 'His copious narratives have something of Ruskin and Dickens in them,' Souday remarks; and he might easily have added George Eliot, whom we know Proust to have read and admired. Souday goes on:

This superabundance of trivial events, this insistence on suggesting explanations of them, is frequently met with in English novels, where the sense of life is produced by a kind of …

The Twenty-Fifth George Eliot Memorial Lecture: The Larger Meaning Of Your Voice: Varieties Of Speech In George Eliot, Raymond Chapman

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

When Ladislaw has watched and listened to Dorothea in the Vatican Museum, he says to the painter Naumann that language is superior to painting and 'gives a fuller image, which is all the better for being vague.[ ... ] This woman whom you have just seen, for example: how would you paint her voice, pray? But her voice is much diviner than anything you have seen of her.' The novelist does in a way paint the voice, using the visual signs of written language to convey an auditory experience.

Written dialogue may be naturalistic and idiomatic in its choice of …

Review Of Middlemarch's Three New Editions, Margaret Harris, Judith Johnston, David Carroll, Felicia Bonaparte, Rosemary Ashton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Readers of Middlemarch, it is a pleasure to report, are now spoil for choice. Joining an already saturated market are three new paperback editions, attractively produced at a very reasonable price with full critical apparatus, including textual notes, explanatory notes, introductions, chronologies, recommendations for further reading and even, in the case of the Everyman Paperbacks edition, a synopsis of the plot chapter by chapter (although the editors are quick to point out that this is 'intended to serve as an index, not as analysis', nor presumably as a substitute for reading the novel itself). The Everyman edition claims on its …

'Heard But Not Seen': An Anthology Of Victorian Childhood Devised And Presented, Gabriel Woolf, Rosalind Shanks

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This year's performance of readings was subtitled A Victorian Edition of Children's Hour, and was intended for adults. The programme was constructed round the framework of the childhood of Tom and Maggie from The Mill on the Floss and included insights into the lives of other children in both fact and fiction.

Actors are usually advised that it is unwise to act with children, but to play the part of a child is another matter, and certainly not child's play. We suspended disbelief, however, and enjoyed the guilelessness of Ruthless Rhymes by Harry Graham as well as Tom and Maggie's …

Review Of The Power Of Knowledge: George Eliot And Education, Linda K. Roberston

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This book, volume 61 of the University of Kansas Humanistic Studies series, purports to do one thing but delivers another. According to the blurb on the back cover, Robertson demonstrates that George Eliot had much to say on a number of educational issues that plagued her contemporaries. In fiction, essays, and letters, we are told, she commented on various Victorian educational debates about illiteracy, the desirability of a classical education and higher education for women. In her introduction, Robertson briefly reminds us of some nineteenth- century writers on education: Newman, Mill, Huxley, Ruskin, Arnold, Spencer and Whewell, the Master of …

A Forgotten Critic: Abba Goold Woolson's George Eliot And Her Heroines: A Study, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I feel that one should draw attention to the fact that in 1886 an American woman established certain emphases which succeeding critics followed, developed and extended in the twentieth century. This small book (published by Harper Brothers, New York) is a serious investigation of George Eliot's art, even employing the kind of language (Data Necessary for an Estimate of her Mind and Works') which links the scientific and the literary as a kind of consonance with George Eliot's own practice. As early as the second page there is an unequivocal assertion of the nature of her greatness - 'the name …

Review Of George Eliot And Europe, John Rignall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot and Europe arrives at a timely moment, when the nature of the relationship between Britain and the Continent is at best ambiguous, and when the parameters of 'Europe' are anxiously contested. In some ways, things have not altered much since the middle and late nineteenth century: nationalism, immigration, militancy, cultural isolationism - all of these were as important to nineteenth-century ways of thinking as they are today. This collection of essays, based on a conference and part of a series which seeks to understand Europe in relation to the rest of the world, insists that in order to …

Review Of The Mill On The Floss

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In this lamentably impoverished adaptation by Hugh Stoddart (directed by Graham Theakston), a character identified as Sophy Deane (played by Joanna David) masqueraded as one of three Dodson sisters. That George Eliot created a unit of four sisters is of minor consequence, since their individuality apparently merited so little concern that it was deemed fitting to amalgamate the lachrymose Sophy Pullet with Lucy Deane's mother, Susan - an expedient that, instead of giving us two for the price of one, merely effaced them both. In effect, every opportunity to avoid the danger of distinguishing one sister from another appeared to …

The Quest Of Anonymity: The Novels Of George Eliot, Henry Alley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This book derives from half a lifetime's teaching and the author's obvious affinity for George Eliot. It is earnest, sometimes engaging, often off centre. It also exists in a kind of time-warp, somewhere in the 1960s in terms of tone and stance, though there is an impressive range of criticism and background reading cited and occasionally milked. In fact, this back-up seems to be an attempt to establish critical credentials, and the constant references in which Alley says 'And I would add ... " or merely summarizes arguments reflect this. At his best he has no need of this, since …

Review Of Perspectives On Self And Comunity In George Eliot: Dorothea's Window, Patricia Gately, Dennis Leavens, D. Cole Woodcox

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This is a modest book, edited by three people who are so modest that they reveal nothing at all about their identities. It is possible to discover from a footnote on p.159 that it is a product of a conference on George Eliot although further details of that event remain undisclosed. Two of its contributors, however, are well known in George Eliot circles: Barbara Hardy and Felicia Bonaparte. Their essays are certainly worth reading while all the other contributions have something new to say about Eliot's work even if they are by today's standards under-theorized. One looks in vain in …

Review Of Realism, Representation, And The Arts In Nineteenth-Century Literature, Alison Byerly

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Dr. Alison Byerly's concern is with the use in their fiction by four Victorian novelists of art works, performative as well as representational, experienced by the characters as well as metaphors within the larger narrative frame, works both real and invented - the Vatican's antique Cleopatra/Ariadne in Middlemarch, for example, as well as the Agamemnon charade of Vanity Fair. Byerly sees this process as intimately bound up with 'realism' (the term is commonly offered to us in inverted commas) and with the self-consciousness of her chosen novelists: Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. This process, in turn, points …

Review Of George Eliot, Josephine Mcdonagh

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

While the old 'Writers and their Work' pamphlets were very useful in their staid, often belles-lettristic, way, since the series was relaunched in 1994 under the General Editorship of Isobel Armstrong it has made its mark in a more forthright and compelling manner. These monographs are longer than their predecessors, at around 40,000 words, and while they are uniform in format, in a livery of nationalist red, white and blue, they respond distinctively to their brief: 'Drawing upon the most recent thinking in English studies, each book considers biographical material, examines modem criticism, includes a detailed bibliography, and offers a …

'Tied To My Heart By A Cord Which Can Never Be Broken': George Eliot And Her Sister Chrissey, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Christiana Evans, always known as Chrissey, was the first child of Robert Evans's marriage to Christiana Pearson of Astley, near Nuneaton, and she was born, as were Isaac and Mary Ann, at Arbury (now South) Farm on the Arbury estate in 1814. When the family moved to Griff House in 1820 Chrissey was old enough to go to boarding school and she went in advance of her small sister to Miss Lathom's School in nearby Attleborough. This removed her from Griff to the closer vicinity of her Aunt Evarard, later to appear as one of the Dodson sisters in The …

Annual Report 1997, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

1997 was, as always, a busy year for the Fellowship, beginning with the Annual General Meeting on 14 March. Mrs. Kathleen Porter retired from the Fellowship Council and was thanked for many supportive years. The Chairman had just completed twenty-five years in office and was presented with a gift token to show the Fellowship's appreciation for all those years in office. Mr. David Adams was elected to take the place of Mrs. Porter and Mrs. Vivienne Wood of King Edward Sixth Form College, Nuneaton was co-opted for one year. A George Eliot version of 'Call my Bluff' concluded the meeting. …

H.D. Prosed: The Future Of An Imagist Poet, Robert Spoo

Articles, Chapters in Books and Other Contributions to Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

British Women Poets Of The Romantic Era: An Anthology, Paula R. Feldman

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

In Search Of A Female Self : The Masculinization Of May In Chaucer's Merchant's Tale, Kimberly Diane Whitley

Master's Theses

This examination of Chaucer's Merchant's Tale was undertaken as a response to existing scholarship. While criticism in the past tended toward a literal reading of the text, viewing it as a misogynist Merchant's story attesting to the innate depravity of women, more recent feminist criticism has leaned toward a reading which endeavors to defend the actions of May, claiming an evolvement on her part towards autonomy and self-knowledge. This thesis, taking its cue from French feminist theoretical assertions concerning self, refutes both of these readings. While it acknowledges the subversive nature of May's actions, it is unable to recognize any …

Anna Letitia Barabauld's Poetic Vision: Community, Imagination, And The Quotidian, Carrie Ann Woods

Master's Theses

With the publication of her Poems in 1773, favorable reviews welcomed Anna Letitia Barbauld into the literary world. However, Barbauld has traditionally been left out of English literature anthologies, condemned to the murky depths of obscurity. Why has this talented British poet of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries been undeservedly marginalized? Perhaps she has never achieved the status of a major literary figure because her impulse towards community places her outside the mainstream Romantic tradition dominated by the "egotistical sublime." In the poetry of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Keats, an …

An Examination Of Biography In Possession By A.S. Byatt And Dickens By Peter Ackroyd, Sylvia Mcleod

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis is an examination of Possession by A.S. Byatt and Dickens by Peter Ackroyd, and aims to contribute to the Poetics of biography. Although there has been a paucity of literature about biography until the latter part of the twentieth century, a growing number of writings, by biographers and scholars, reflects the interest in developing a body of theory of the biography genre. My thesis is a part of this initiative. The two works which I have chosen for this project are critiques of biography, albeit from different perspectives. Possession is a novel which narrativises issues of biography, while …

"Some Pieces In The British Magazine" And "A Small Part Of The Translation Of Voltaire’S Works": Smollett Attributions, Barbara L. Fitzpatrick

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Address At The Unveiling Of John Letts's Statue Of George Eliot At The George Eliot Hospital, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This is, of course, the second time many of us have attended the unveiling of a statue of George Eliot. The last time was in 1986 and John, I know, will remember what an exciting time that was. Even before the unveiling we had met in Newdegate Square to await her arrival from the foundry. She arrived on the back of a lorry, almost as though she had thumbed a lift up from High Wycombe. When she was unveiled by our President she shone like a new penny.

From that day on I have wished that the George Eliot Hospital …