English Language and Literature Commons^™

Review Of George Eliot In Society: Travels Abroad And Sundays At The Priory, Kathleen Mccormack

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This is a welcome and wholly worthwhile extension of the author's George Eliot's English Travels: Composite Characters and Coded Communication (2005), a densely written and stimulating examination of places and people in Eliot's life which have some resonance, in varying degrees of coding, from the seemingly casual to the subtly integrated, in her published work. McCormack there defined three categories of place identification. These range from 'absolute certainties' through 'pretty good cases' to 'alluring, probable, but irretrievably speculative suppositions', categories certainly applicable to herpresent study, in which her dedication and saturation in George Eliot, the works, the life, and a …

The Golden Gates Are Passed, Robert Muscutt

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

There have always been attempts not just to conceal knowledge of George Eliot's life but also to manipulate it into conformity with a preconceived profile. In the Preface to his edition of The George Eliot Letters in nine volumes, Gordon Haight revealed that those pages of her Journal from immediately after her father's death in 1849 until shortly before she went to Weimar with Lewes in 1854 were tom out and presumably destroyed, probably by Cross. Charles Lewes, George Eliot's main literary executor, also seems to have destroyed nine of his father 's journals, the first volume extant beginning in …

'The Antigone And Its Moral': George Eliot's Antigonean Considerations, Kathryn Brigger Kruger

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

As early as 1856 with the publication of the essay, 'The Antigone and Its Moral' ,1 George Eliot turned her literary attention to the Sophoclean figure of Antigone. Scholars such as Gerhard Joseph' and David Moldstad' have enumerated Eliot's multiple references to Antigone, and they have argued that Eliot makes Antigone a relevant figure for '"modern" life' (Joseph, 27) and an example of 'the continuity of man's elemental self, concerned in all ages with similar needs and problems, though moral codes have come and gone' (Moldstad, 531). Where Joseph traces the specific Antigone references in Eliot's fiction - especially in …

Review Of Reading For Our Time: 'Adam Bede' And 'Middlemarch' Revisited, J. Hillis Miller

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

As his sub-title indicates, J. Hillis Miller is returning in his latest book to the study of George Eliot, bringing to bear on Adam Bede and Middlemarch the insight and erudition acquired in a long and distinguished career as a scholar and critic. He pursues a similar line to his wellknown articles from the 1970s on 'Narrative and History' and 'Optic and Semiotic in Middlemarch', subjecting that novel to a close and tenacious deconstructive reading that brings out the sophisticated self-qualifying nature of George Eliot's fiction. This is preceded by a shorter discussion of Adam Bede which shows how its …

Japanese Branch Report- 2012, Shinsuke Hori

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On Saturday 1 December 2012, the Sixteenth Annual Convention of the George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at Kansai University of Foreign Studies.

The morning session started with an opening address by Chizuko Watari (Kansai University of Foreign Studies). Three papers were presented in the morning session. The first two were commented upon by Midori Niino (Kobe University of Foreign Studies) and the third by Masayuki Kato (Kobe University).

The first speaker was Ayako Tani (Fukuoka University), whose subject was 'The Idea of a Double in Daniel Deronda: Grandcourt's Death and Gwendolen's Rebirth'. Grandcourt's death has been often criticized …

The Forty-First George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 2012- Romola's Artists, Leonee Ormond

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

2012-2013 marks the one hundred and fiftieth birthday of Romola. Originally published in the Comhill Magazine from July 1862 to August 1863, it later appeared in a three volume edition in 1863. An illustrated edition followed in 1865.

George Eliot had begun work on the novel in 1861, when she was forty-one. She had recently published Silas Mamer, and The Mill on the Floss, preceded by Adam Bede, had come out not long before that. The genesis of Romola came in May 1860 when George Eliot and George Henry Lewes spent two weeks in Florence. Lewes noted that, …

Review Of Form And Feeling In Modern Literature: Essays In Honour Of Barbara Hardy, Isobel Armstrong, William Baker

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Does criticism move in circles and cycles? Perhaps, like a Yeatsian gyre, it progresses by revolving and rotating. If times have changed utterly since the appearance of Barbara Hardy's first book, The Novels of George Eliot (1959), then it is also hard to ignore how some new directions in criticism appear to be rediscovering matters close to this great critic's heart. Form and feeling, certainly, are both back. Professor Hardy used these two unfussy terms to describe, respectively, literature's structured way of happening and its potential to arouse or enrich a reader's felt experience; now, in the more modish guises …

George Eliot, Marcel Proust, And The Logic Of Desire, Kenichi Kurata

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The influence of George Eliot's fiction on Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time has often been discussed. For instance, L. A. Bisson drew attention in 1945 to 'the possibility, even the likelihood, of[ ... ] [an] immediate and sympathetic suggestion' by Eliot, citing Proust's claim in 1910 that 'II n'y a pas de litterature qui ait sur moi un pouvoir comparable a la litterature anglaise ... deux pages du Moulin sur la Floss me font pleurer.'2 Bisson goes on to suggest that three specific passages in The Mill on the Floss have their counterparts in Proust's work, the …

Chairman's Annual Report 2012, John Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The year began in March with an introduction to Romo/a for the Nuneaton George Eliot Study Group which was attended by nearly forty local members. This was followed up by more in depth sessions on Romola at Bedworth Almshouses after Easter. These sessions were aimed at those going to Florence in November, to walk in Romola's footsteps. Numbers were constant throughout the sessions and we ended the ten sessions by watching the 1924 silent film version of the book. The study notes for these sessions will be made available to members worldwide on the website

Following the AGM that same …

Review Of The Ladislaw Case, Inke Thormahlen

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

We live in an age of prequels and sequels either in book form or in television serials, with nineteenth-century novelists providing the majority of the material for contemporary writers to develop or elaborate. It was perhaps only a matter of time before one of George Eliot's novels was to form the basis for such treatment. In this case the novel is probably her greatest, Middlemarch, and the sequel, The Ladislaw Case, is the first major work of a young Swedish graduate of Lund University, Imke Thormahlen.

Twelve years after the conclusion of Middlemarch, Will Ladislaw, now married to Dorothea (Brooke, …

George Eliot, Scientific Materialism And Literary Form: Some Relfections On Felicia Bonaparte's Will And Destiny, K.M. Newton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Felicia Bonaparte's study of Eliot's fiction, Will and Destiny: Morality and Tragedy in George Eliot's Novels, was published in 1975. I read it rather quickly towards the end of the 1970s because at the time I was working on a study of Eliot of my own and inevitably my attention was somewhat focused on whether there was going to be any overlap with my book. Since Bonaparte's book argued strongly that Eliot was intellectually committed to empiricism and scientific rationality and mine attempted to bring out her relation to aspects …

Material Memory: Willa Cather, “My First Novels [There Were Two]”, And The Colophon: A Book Collector’S Quarterly, Matthew J. Lavin

Digital Initiatives and Special Collections

Willa Cather's 1931 essay "My First Novels [There Were Two]" is an often-cited statement on place in the author's literary oeuvre. In the essay, Cather distances herself from her first novel 'Alexander's Bridge' (1912) and its imitative, Jamesian motifs and setting. Her second novel 'O Pioneers!', she writes, was a kind of second "first" novel, one written "entirely for myself" and preoccupied with the story of "Scandinavians and Bohemians who had been neighbors of ours when I lived on a ranch in Nebraska." As Merrill Maguire Skaggs, Robert Thacker and Emmy Stark Zitter have argued, "My First Novels [There Were …

Intermodality In Teaching Writing, Margarette Christensen

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation articulates a writing pedagogy based on a theory of intermodality to help writing instructors navigate the affordances and challenges of multimodal composition. Drawing from recent discoveries in neuroscience about how the brain makes meaning, I situate this pedagogy of intermodality – literally, “between the modes” – within the Rhetoric and Composition traditions of embodied rhetoric and visual/multi-sensory rhetoric. A pedagogy attuned to intermodality capitalizes on how the senses (“modes”) work together to create meaning when composing with sound, image, movement, and text. In addition to the five senses, intermodality also incorporates the cultural, social, and material aspects of …

On Sir Charles Bell’S The Hand, 1833, Peter J. Capuano

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This essay explores the cultural context in which Sir Charles Bell’s 1833 Bridgewater Treatise was published by focusing on the work as a culmination of his deep religious faith, his Edinburgh anatomical training, and his occupation as a surgeon at the Leeds Infirmary. It argues that The Handwas not merely an extension of Paleyan natural theology but also an important response to the era’s struggle with the grim physical reality of the supersession of manual labor by automatic manufacture.

Significant Themes In 19th-Century Literature, Matthew L. Jockers, David Mimno

Department of English: Faculty Publications

External factors such as author gender, author nationality, and date of publication affect both the choice of literary themes in novels and the expression of those themes, but the extent of this association is difficult to quantify. In this work, we apply statistical methods to identify and extract hundreds of "topics" from a corpus of 3,346 works of 19th-century British, Irish, and American fiction. We use these topics as a measurable, data-driven proxy for literary themes. External factors may predict fluctuations in the use of themes and the individual word choices within themes. We use topics to measure the evidence …

Using Place Conscious Education And Social Action To Plug The "Rural Brain Drain", Danielle M. Helzer

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The following thesis will explore the Rural Brain Drain phenomenon as outlined by researchers Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas and its relation to a rural Nebraska school. In order to take action against the exodus of small-town America’s best and brightest, I propose a pedagogical solution that is a blend of Place Conscious Education and Social Action. The last part of the document features a narrative section describing how I’ve implemented the aforementioned solution into English 9 classes at Ogallala High School and the impact this had on students involved.

Adviser: Robert Brooke

What I Mean When I Say Autism: Re-Thinking The Roles Of Language And Literacy In Autism Discourse, Bernice M. Olivas

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Literacy studies are deeply intertwined with issues of identity. Olivas explores the ways that public discourses of autism have constructed an autism “Identity kit,” as defined by James Paul Gee, which harms autistic students and communities more than it helps. This is particularly true for adult autistics. Considering the growing presence of the autistic learner in the composition classroom, it is important to understand how public discourse influences classroom dynamics. Drawing heavily on her own experience as the mother of autistic sons and on Melanie Yergeau’s “Circle Wars: Reshaping the Typical Autism Essay,” Olivas explores how her children have been …

Disciplinary Permeations: Complicating The "Public" And The "Private" Dualism In Composition And Rhetoric, Erica E. Rogers

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

As Composition and Rhetoric rose in disciplinary status and academic legitimacy the discourse practice of negation, the positioning of texts in oppositional binaries that set the “new” over the “old,” the “novel” over the “familiar,” became embedded in academic tradition, seeming to be an inherited part of scholarship instead of an individual’s rhetorical choice and deliberate ethos strategy. Negation, when one idea or set of ideas constructed by another is critiqued, advocated, and/or redeveloped by another scholar, is a discourse practice firmly established in the Rhetorical Tradition as part of Socratic dialogues, reappears in “modern rhetoric”, and remains today as …

Trans-Spatiality As The Horizon Of The Coming Community: Ethico-Ontology And Aesthetics In Asian Immigrant Literature, Dae-Joong Kim

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study centers on the potential scope and significance of trans-spatiality as a new literary concept. I employ the concept of trans-spatiality as a means of understanding Asian immigrants’ transnational experiences as represented by Asian immigrant writers in the Anglophone world. Trans-spatiality is a grounding term and methodological orientation, and its scope is relational and appositional. Thus, previous studies such as postcolonialism, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, diaspora studies, and globalization are related to trans-spatiality, but, in this dissertation, I strictly limit its use to an ethico-ontological and aesthetic understanding of Asian immigrant writers’ literary works. For this methodology, I explore and analyze …

Urban Place-Conscious Education: Pride In The Inner City, Tamara A. Zwick

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Many educators are turning to place-conscious education as a means of making students’ education relevant and meaningful, as well as encouraging them to contribute to their local communities in positive ways. While many scholars focus their research on place-conscious education on rural areas, a growing body of scholarship examines how place-conscious principles can be applied in inner city schools. Differences in emphasis and approach exist between the rural and urban scholarship, however. This work analyzes some key differences as well as examining why they might exist. Urban students’ relationship with place is complicated by societal messages which make fostering a …

Traumatized Voices: The Transformation Of Personal Trauma Into Public Writing During The Romantic Era, Karalyne S. Lowery

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Beginning as early as the 1790s and continuing throughout the nineteenth century, it is possible to trace in British literature a distinctive line of fascination among authors with what we now understand to be trauma and its profound effects on the lives and behaviors of it victims/survivors. With today’s neurological proof of the changes that take place in the brains of traumatized individuals, it stands to reason that these changes have taken place in every century, not just the century in which we have had the technology to view it or the vocabulary to describe it. This means that psychological …

Thirdspace Professional Development As Effective Response To The Contested Spaces Of Computers And Writing, Jason L. Mcintosh

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In the physical spaces of writing classrooms and the conceptual spaces of writing practice and pedagogy, knowledge about computers is constructed by many individuals, groups, and institutions. Each has a stake in defining what computers mean for education and the role computers should play in the everyday life schools. Some of these stakeholders are immediate members of our school communities, such as students, teachers, administrators, and technology support staff. Some are not, such as politicians, researchers, and computer manufacturers. The effect of these often competing stakeholders is one of contested space. Writing teachers encounter contested space when we decide to …

Imaginary You, Joshua A. Ware

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Imaginary You is a multi-genre collection subdivided into three sections: “Impossible Motels,” “Imaginary Portraits,” and “Writing through Nightwood.” One of the manuscript’s main concerns is the exploration of an in-between space formed by the conflation of real and imagined experience. More specifically, the writing puts pressure on Wallace Stevens’ aphorisms, as stated in his Adagia, that “In poetry at least the imagination must not detach itself from reality,” and “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a …

"The Borders Between Us": Loren Eiseley's Ecopoetics, Thomas Lynch

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Loren Eiseley's literary reputation today rests almost exclusively on the significance of his nonfiction nature essays, which deservedly stand as influential exemplars of creative nonfiction science and nature writing. However, in his early years as an undergraduate at the University of Nebraska, Eiseley had the reputation as an important and promising poet, and he published poetry in a range of literary journals. Most notably, his work appeared in the earliest editions of Prairie Schooner, whose editorial staff he joined in 1927, the year after it began publication. And, not limited to his own school's journal, he a variety of other …

The Shape Of Catharine Sedgwick's Career, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Catharine Maria Sedgwick published her first novel in 1822 and her last in 1857. Her productivity slackened in the 1850S, as aging weakened her eyesight and arthritis made it difficult to write clearly. However, from 1822 through the 1840s, she published multiple works of prose fiction (tales, sketches, novellas, or novels) nearly every year. Despite this extraordinary record of productivity, Sedgwick regularly appears in literary history as the author of a single work, Hope Leslie (I827), her historical novel about relations between the Puritans and the native inhabitants of New England. A few other women authors before and contemporary with …

Knowing Too Much: The Burden Of Omniscience In The Lifted Veil, Melissa Raines

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In the spring of 1859, not long after the success of her first novel, Adam Bede, George Eliot submitted a much shorter work to her publisher, John Blackwood, for his consideration. Blackwood's eventual letter in response to the piece arrived more than a fortnight later and had to be prompted by Eliot's partner, George Henry Lewes. Perhaps Blackwood's belated reply was somewhat understandable: he must initially have been thrilled by the prospect of another submission from the rising new author, but the strangeness of this undeniably macabre new tale unsettled him. A story of supernatural power and science that pushed …

Review Of Dorothea's Daughter And Other Nineteenth-Century Postscripts, Barbara Hardy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This book is the fruit of many years of thought about nine great novels. Barbara Hardy does not present us with a series of sequels, though we do learn of things that happened after the action of the novels ended. Rather, she offers a set of conversations in which two (or, in some cases, three) characters from each novel reflect on the past. This formula allows her to focus on aspects of the stories that intrigue her, or that frustrate her wish to have a full understanding of fictional people who, it is clear, move and interest her as much …

Review Of The Life Of George Eliot: A Critical Biography, Nancy Henry

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The literary biographer's most difficult task is to find plausible, sophisticated ways of connecting a human life with the art that emerges from it. In the case of a major imaginative artist like George Eliot, the accumulated weight of previous biographies and critical studies only makes that task more challenging. Nancy Henry confronts this situation head-on in The Life of George Eliot. Her book is not just another re-telling of the familiar narrative, written as if it were starting anew. Instead, Henry has grappled with what a genuinely 'critical biography' might mean on a number of different levels. She interrogates …

Review Of George Eliot: Interviews And Recollections, K.K. Collins

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In his introduction to this fascinating collection of accounts and comments by those who met George Eliot, K. K. Collins points out that modem biographies draw on about forty recollections that have come to form a canon of reminiscence. To this canon his volume adds a large number of unfamiliar sources, arranging more than two hundred items in sections which follow the chronology of her career, with subdivisions for the years of her fame under headings such as 'Sunday Gatherings at the Priory' and 'Eton, Cambridge and Oxford', and with full and helpful annotation of names and details. Of the …

Review Of The Art Of Comparison: How Novels And Critics Compare, Catherine Brown

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This book is a defence of comparative literature in theory - if it has a theory - and in practice by concentrating on three novels - Daniel Deronda, Anna Karenina, Women in Love - which are structurally similar in various respects, most obviously in employing double plots focusing on two couples, and thematically related in terms of their interests and concerns. The book is clearly derived from a doctoral dissertation and has some obvious features of the genre: a thesis which it endeavours to make persuasive by argument and supporting evidence, reference to much previous criticism on the subject, a …