English Language and Literature Commons^™

George Eliot's Counterpublics, Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze

Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze

This talk works through some of the different ways that George Eliot complicates dominant Victorian conceptions of community and belonging through her varied narrative representations of intimacy and affect. I will begin with a brief discussion of how intimacy and affect operate in relation to nineteenth-century realism; then I will explore some of the ways in which the Victorian ideal of an imagined sympathetic community works as an aspirational Victorian narrative of intimate belonging, and how in Eliot’s hands this ideal community works as a potential counter-narrative of intimacy, making space for less-conventional intimacies, like the one she shared with …