English Language and Literature Commons^™

Two Sequels To Daniel Deronda, John Rignaill

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The two sequels of my title are a seven page satirical squib in Mr Punch's Pocket-Book for 1877 entitled 'Daniel Deronda, Book IX',' and a short novel or long story of around 50,000 words - much the same length as 'Mr Gilfil's Love-Story' - Gwendolen: or, Reclaimed: A Sequel to Daniel Deronda published in Boston, Mass., in 1878. The novel was published anonymously but there is one edition published by William F. Gill with a variant title page giving the author as one Anna Clay Beecher/ whose identity remains a mystery.' Both these texts have been contextualized , discussed and …

The Egyptian Sorcerer's Drop Of Ink In Adam Bede, Tapan Kumar Mukherjee

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance corner far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen, I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799.

Many scholars and critics have discussed the symbolic significance of the famous opening sentence of Adam Bede and related it to …

On Writing Neo-Victorian Fiction: James Miranda Barry (1999) And Sophie And The Sibyl: A Victorian Romance (2015), Patricia Duncker

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

My first historical novel - James Miranda Barry (1999) was not born a Neo-Victorian novel, but became one. And it had a very personal link to my own life. Barry was a nineteenth-century colonial doctor and medical reformer, who had a very successful and colourful career in remote parts of the Empire. He spent an important period of his life in Jamaica, then a British colony, during the 1830s, taking care of the army garrison stationed on the island to protect the interests of the Crown and put down the numerous slave revolts. The British maintained a regiment there until …

The Radical Candidature: Harold Transome's Political Motivation In Felix Holt, David Paterson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In late 1832 Great Britain was preparing for a special General Election. A Reform Bill passed in June had extended voting rights to the middle class, and parliamentary constituencies were re-distributed to enfranchise some of the larger industrial towns. Many Tory landed gentry had - unsuccessfully - opposed the change. So, early on in Felix Halt, the Radical, it comes as a surprise to the reader as well as his family when Harold Transome, heir to the Transome estates, declares his political allegiance. Just returned from abroad where he had made his fortune in business, he does not intend to …

George Henry Lewes, The Real Man Of Science Behind George Eliot’S Fictional Pedants, Beverley Rilett

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This paper demonstrates that George Eliot drew on George Henry Lewes’s actual experience as an emerging scientist in her depiction of two fictional scholars, Edward Casaubon of Middlemarch and Proteus Merman, a lesser-known character from the chapter entitled “How We Encourage Research” in her final work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such. After Thomas Huxley published a devastating review of Lewes’s first book of science, Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences, the evidence suggests that Lewes became highly focused on disproving his critics and earning lasting recognition as a scientist, a feat he expected to achieve with his five-volume series, Problems …

Buried In Plain Sight: Unearthing Willa Cather’S Allusion To Thomas William Parsons’S “The Sculptor’S Funeral”, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In January 1905, Willa Cather’s story “The Sculptor’s Funeral” appeared in McClure’s Magazine and shortly thereafter in her first book of fiction, The Troll Garden, a collection of stories about art and artists. In the story, the body of sculptor Harvey Merrick arrives in his hometown of Sand City, Kansas, on a train from Boston, accompanied by his friend and former student, Henry Steavens. Cather criticism has long been concerned with identifying real-world prototypes for characters and situations in her fiction, and two such prototypes have been unearthed for “The Sculptor’s Funeral.” First, the return by train of the …

The Transatlantic Village: The Rise And Fall Of The Epistolary Friendship Of Catharine Maria Sedgwick And Mary Russell Mitford, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In June 1830, the American novelist and short-story writer Catharine Maria Sedgwick used the imminent London publication of her novel Clarence as a pretext for initiating a correspondence with the British author Mary Russell Mitford. In her first letter to Mitford, Sedgwick addressed her as “My dear Miss Mitford,” a violation of epistolary decorum in a letter to someone to whom she had not been introduced (FOMRM, 155).¹ As Sedgwick protested, however, “I cannot employ the formal address of a stranger towards one who has inspired the vivid feeling of intimate acquaintance, a deep and affectionate interest in …

Courtly Connections: Anthony Sherley’S Relation Of His Travels (1613) In A Global Context, Kaya Sahin, Julia Schleck

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This article revisits Anthony Sherley’s Relation of his travels into Persia (1613), reading the text within the larger context of early modern Eurasia. It highlights the ways in which at least one European traveler sought and found not alterity, but commensurable structures, social roles, political ideologies, and personal motivations in the Islamic polities to the east and emphasized these connections to his European readers. Furthermore, in making the case that Sherley’s narrative is informed by local actors in Safavid Persia, it maintains that a certain level of Eastern knowledge is present within Western texts from this period and awaits scholarly …

Networking With Middleton And Jonson: Theater, Law, And Social Documents, Kelly Stage

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In the lines above, the lawyer Tangle seems to be listing the tools of his trade, various legal documents he uses regularly. However, the list names more than just documents; it also labels the stream of blood trickling out of Tangle’s arm as he is forced into a purgative healing. Quieto, a lawyer-cum-healer, prescribes a bloodletting because Tangle’s long association with ink has infected him and the only way to cure him of poisonous legal practice is to drain him. Quieto confirms his diagnosis with the protagonist, Phoenix, who looks into the basin catching the blood and exclaims “This, why …

Courtly Connections: Anthony Sherley’S Relation Of His Trauels (1613) In A Global Context, Julia Schleck, Kaya Sahin

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Despite various attempts by literary theorists and historians to find more integrative ways of studying early modern societies and cultures, fairly essentialist notions of the difference between Europe and the rest of the world continue to persist in scholarship. The assumption of fundamental differences then leads to a search for sundry misperceptions, misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, and other skewed representations in early modern texts, particularly in those produced by European travelers. Similarly, studies on cultural, ideological, religious, and intellectual exchanges have not always been able to transcend approaches that solely focus on encounters, a word that sometimes implies haphazard meetings and difficult …

An Awakened Woman With A Room Of Her Own, Erica Garcia

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

In the early 1900’s, women were obviously being oppressed considering they lacked the right to vote, to an education, and to freedom. Through bold women who spoke out against the said oppression, women were able to work together to fight for equality. By digging deeper into the literature of the time period, the point of view of an oppressed woman is more easily seen and can therefore be better understood. Women among Woolf and Chopin, for example, Carrie Chapman Catt helped move along the passing of the 19th Amendment with assistance from the NAWSA. Once women got the ball rolling …

There And Back Again… And Again, Dylan Spilinek

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

The goal of this research project was to analyze literature to understand the time period the piece was written in. J. R. R. Tolkien claimed that his children’s story, The Hobbit, held no historical allegories that related to his time period. However, analyzing The Hobbit shows how Tolkien’s personal life held many areas that influenced his writing, and those who read his tales.

Tolkien was inspired by Beowulf’s epic hero plot and Christian beliefs as seen by his character, ideologies and symbolic objects, and by his naturalistic mindset reflected by the story’s species relations and underlying themes. This childhood …

Overcoming More Than Physical Borders: The Challenges Gender Creates For Hispanic Immigrants, Guadalupe Esquivel

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

An analysis of T. Coraghessan Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain and Sandra Cisneros's “Woman Hollering Creek” shows the measures that Mexican women take to find their identity after immigrating. Facing discrimination on the basis of both race and gender, this task is more difficult for females than for their male counterparts. It is a challenge that continues for many women today as they balance two worlds and are expected to fully carry the roles of both. This is a focus on the main characters of the above texts, Americá Rincón and Cleofilas, respectively, as well as personal essays written by first …

On Writing Neo-Victorian Fiction: James Miranda Barry (1999) And Sophie And The And The Sibyl: A Victorian Romance (2015), Patricia Duncker

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This is the text of the Forty-Fourth George Eliot Memorial Lecture delivered at the Chilvers Coton Heritage Centre on 10 October, 2015. An extended version of this article will appear in late 2016 or early 2017 as an interview/essay in the series 'anglistik & englischunterricht': Christina Flotmann and Anna Lienen (eds.), Victorian Ideologies in Contemporary British Culture, Heidelberg: Winter Verlag.

My first historical novel - lames Miranda Barry (1999) was not born a Neo-Victorian novel, but became one. And it had a very personal link to my own life. Barry was a nineteenth-century colonial doctor and medical reformer, who had …

Revision In The Multiversity: What Composition Can Learn From The Superhero, David Hyman

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

Constant and ongoing revision is the compositional tactic through which many contemporary superhero narratives negotiate the powerful struggle between reiteration of the genre’s past, and creative expression of its future. Instead of a gradual succession of improved renditions of a text, each one effacing and superseding the imperfections of its predecessors, revision is revealed as the production of multiple versions whose differences and diversities are “capable of being in uncertainties”, as Keats describes the creative attitude which he terms Negative Capability: ontologically equal textual variations that wear their inconsistencies openly, and reject the pressure to resolve their multiplicities into the …

Taking My Parents To College, Jennine Capó Crucet

Department of English: Faculty Publications

I was a first-generation college student as well as the first in our family to be born in America — my parents were born in Cuba — and we didn’t yet know that families were supposed to leave pretty much right after they unloaded your stuff from the car. We all made the trip from Miami, my hometown, to what would be my new home at Cornell University. Shortly after arriving on campus, the five of us — my parents, my younger sister, my abuela and me — found ourselves listening to a dean end his welcome speech with the …

Exploring Colonial Identity And A Growing Ecoconsciousness On The Great Plains, Charles Hiebner

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis is an exploration of my journey from an unapologetic industrial agriculturalist to a more environmentally sensitive citizen. I now recognize the inescapable relationship between colonialism and environmental issues surrounding water resources on the Great Plains and how these intertwined issues affect both the planet and its inhabitants. Specifically, I look at literature as both the catalyst and sustainer of my still-growing environmental and social consciousness. From important literary works encountered as a youth to the ecocriticism and explorations of social justice of the readings I engage in today, I examine how these literary choices have led me to …

Beyond Constructing And Capturing: An Aesthetic Analysis Of 1968 Film, Chandler Warren

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study revisits conversations surrounding the global moment of 1968 and the forms of radical filmmaking that occurred during that time. Focusing on the Newsreel collective and the Dziga Vertov Group from the United States and France respectively—groups that utilized very distinct filmmaking methodologies and produced disparate aesthetics—the study argues that traditional leftist film critique must be rethought by acknowledging the revolutionary opportunities afforded to filmmakers through aesthetic elements like voiceovers or intentionally manipulated relationships between image and sound of specific shots. Instead of judging radical films within a spectrum of revolutionary efficacy, the reflexivity afforded to the filmmaker by …

‘I Am Not Your Justification For Existence:’ Mourning, Fascism, Feminism And The Amputation Of Mothers And Daughters In Atwood, Ziervogel, And Ozick, Mitchell C. Hobza

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines the complexities of mother-daughter relationships in twentieth-century women’s literature that includes themes about fascism and totalitarianism. Of central concern is how mothers and daughters are separated, both physically and psychically, in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Meike Ziervogel’s Magda and Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl. Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born provides the theoretical framework for considering maternity and the institution of motherhood. These separations occur through two modes: physical separation by political force; and psychical separation through ideological difference and what Rich terms as “Matrophobia.” The physical separation is analyzed through a synthesis of Rich’s theory …

From England's Bridewell To America's Brides: Imprisoned Women, Shakespeare's Measure For Measure, And Empire, Alicia Meyer

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines the experience of largely single women in London’s house of correction, Bridewell Prison, and argues that Bridewell’s prisoners, and the nature of their crimes, reveal the state’s desire for dependent, sexually controlled, yet ultimately productive women. Scholars have largely neglected the place of early modern women’s imprisonment despite its pervasive presence in the everyday lives of common English women. By examining the historical and cultural implications of early modern women and prison, this thesis contends that women’s prisons were more than simply establishments of punishment and reform. A closer examination of Bridewell’s philosophy and practices shows how …

Scenes From The Gaijin Life, Ian M. Rogers

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Scenes from the Gaijin Life contains eight interconnected stories about foreigners (gaijin in Japanese) living and working as English teachers in urban Japan. It recounts their daily lives and initial struggles, their jobs and their nights out, their formal conversations and their personal ones. The first five stories use a detached, neutral narration that forces readers to interpret sensory details on their own, while the latter three use an omniscient narration that helps readers understand the characters’ interactions with Japan. Though the eight scenes are all different, they’re connected by estrangement, longing, uncertainty, and the characters’ ever-present dissatisfaction with …

Developing An Image-Based Classifier For Detecting Poetic Content In Historic Newspaper Collections, Elizabeth M. Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh, Maanas Varma Datla, Spencer Kulwicki

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Faculty Publications

"Developing an Image-Based Classifier for Detecting Poetic Content in Historic Newspaper Collections" details and analyzes the first stage of work of the Image Analysis for Archival Discovery project team. Our team is is investigating the use of image analysis to identify poetic content in historic newspapers. The project seeks both to augment the study of literary history by drawing attention to the magnitude of poetry published in newspapers and by making the poetry more readily available for study, as well as to advance work on the use of digital images in facilitating discovery in digital libraries and other digitized collections. …

Willa Cather, Sarah Orne Jewett, And The Historiography Of Lesbian Sexuality, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Since the publication of Surpassing the Love of Men in 1981 and Sharon O'Brien's biography Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice in 1987, Cather's fiction has been subjected to scores of queer readings. These readings are, in many respects, premised on a very different understanding of gender, sexuality, and identity than Faderman and O'Brien deploy in their biographical identifications of Cather as a lesbian. Nevertheless, these queer readings rest upon a biographical foundation, and in particular upon an understanding of Cather as secretive, private, and afflicted with shame. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in an influential reading of The Professor's House that inspired …

American Novelist Catharine Sedgwick Negotiates British Copyright, 1822–57, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

American novelist Catharine Maria Sedgwick had an unusually long career and her books were reprinted in Britain in a variety of circumstances and formats. Both her first novel, A New-England Tale (1822), and her last, Married or Single? (1857), appeared in London editions arranged by her or her American publishers, as did many of her books in between (including travel, children’s and conduct books). However, her works also appeared in unauthorized reprints. Sedgwick thus makes an interesting case study of how law and custom regulated the reprinting of American literary texts in Great Britain after 1820. Focusing on the British …

Coelum Britannicum: Inigo Jones And Symbolic Geometry, Rumiko Handa

Architecture Program: Faculty Scholarly and Creative Activity

Inigo Jones’s interpretation that Stonehenge was a Roman temple of Coelum, the god of the heavens, was published in 1655, 3 years after his death, in The most notable Antiquity of Great Britain, vulgarly called Stone-Heng, on Salisbury Plain, Restored.¹ King James I demanded an interpretation in 1620. The task most reasonably fell in the realm of Surveyor of the King’s Works, which Jones had been for the preceding 5 years. According to John Webb, Jones’s assistant since 1628 and executor of Jones’s will, it was Webb who wrote the book based on Jones’s “few indigested” notes, on …

Wreath-Laying In Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey 17 July 2014, Beryl Gray

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Every one of us attending this ceremony in Poets' Corner today is surely conscious of a great debt of gratitude to George Eliot for the legacy of her works. This year, partly due to the appearance of Rebecca Mead's memoir, one particular work - Middlemarch - has been the focus of much attention; and of all George Eliot's books it's the existence of Middlemarch for which I am myself most grateful. It's therefore on that work that I shall be focusing today.

For many decades it has been generally accepted that Middlemarch is George Eliot's greatest novel.' The writer Julian …

The George Eliot Review: Journal Of The George Eliot Fellowship- 2015 No. 46, Beryl Gray, John Rignall, Michael Davis

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

CONTENTS

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

ARTICLES Jen Davis: Silas Marner: George Eliot's most Coleridgean Work? (Prize Essay)........................... 8

Barbara Hardy: Elizabeth Gaskell in Middlemarch: Timothy Cooper, the Judgement of Solomon, and the Woman at the Window................................. .16

Marianne Burton: How Much did Dorothea and Celia Know? Sexual Ignorance and Knowledge among Unmarried Girls in Middlemarch ........................................ 21

Kate Osborne: Mr Brooke's Thinking Organ...................................................... 29

John Rignall: Middlemarch and the Franco-Prussian War ............................... 38

Rodney Edgecombe: Felix Holt and the Gusset of Futurity ...............................46

Rosemary J. Burges Woods: A Life Reclaimed: George Evans (1766-1857) of Norbury, Winster, Derby and Belper …

Chairman's Annual Report For 2014, John Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

No wonder we all felt exhausted by December! In preparing this report I have realized what an extraordinary number of things the Fellowship did last year; certainly the biggest workload since I became chairman but, one hopes, a year which brought new insights and pleasures to members and non-members we attract to our events.

Our normal pattern of meetings took place but was supplemented by several other large-scale events. Thus the AGM in March, which included the routine election of officers and council members, was enclosed by two much more exciting events. In February we had a full house at …

Elizabeth Gaskell In Middlemarch: Timothy Cooper, The Judgement Of Solomon, And The Woman At The Window, Barbara Hardy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" Gaskell and Harriet Martineau were the only living novelists George Eliot praised, and very briefly. George Eliot and Gaskell never met but corresponded, admired each other's work, and in several books George Eliot unconsciously drew on details and characters from Gaskell novels.3 There are three important details in Middlemarch - which Gaskell never read because she died before its publication - deriving from Cousin Phillis, Wives and Daughters, and North and South.

Chapter 56 of Middlemarch is a meeting-point for history and the personal life. Caleb Garth's social confidence rings loud as he speaks …

Note: Alcharisi And The Redundant Definite Article, John Rignall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In critical and scholarly writing about Daniel Deronda, Daniel's mother, the Princess Leonora Halm-Eberstein, is all too often referred to as 'the Alcharisi'. In fact, the definite article is only used on one occasion in conjunction with her former stage name, when she tells Daniel that 'I was the Alcharisi you have heard of' (Ch. 51). The definite article simply specifies the particular Alcharisi she was. This is like, for instance, Maria Callas saying to someone on a first meeting 'I am the Callas you have heard of’. Just as this would not license anyone to refer to her thereafter …