English Language and Literature Commons^™

Address At Wreath-Laying In The George Eliot Memorial Garden, Nuneaton 11 June 2006, Tim Over

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

May I begin by thanking the Fellowship for the invitation to be the principal guest at the annual wreath-laying ceremony. My association with today's event goes back over a number of years bringing students to lay a floral tribute at the obelisk. Indeed, when I first came more schools were involved. It is fitting that the secondary school named after many would say the greatest Victorian woman novelist, still comes along faithfully to the Memorial Garden. Kathleen and Bill Adams have visited the school, talked to groups of students and presented the school with a portrait of George Eliot and …

Review Of George Eliot: A Critic's Biography, Barbara Hardy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Barbara Hardy has been thinking and writing about George Eliot for about fifty years, always in ways that push against reigning orthodoxies, and that immerse us in particular patterns of imagery, affect, or narrative organization that make the substance and texture of George Eliot's work come alive. Her new book is no exception. This 'anti-biography', as she calls it, is an attempt 'to redress the balance' of conventional biography by focusing on the effect of George Eliot's life on her writing, rather than on retelling the story of her life (xi). In fact, it redresses more balances than that. Hardy …

Review Of Identifying The Remains: George Eliot's Death In The London Religious Press, K.K. Collins

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This is a detailed examination of the various religious-based obituaries which followed George Eliot's death in December 1880. It exposes misinformation, largely biographical, examines bias, confusion, open and concealed concerns, direct, responsible and weighted theological arguments, dubious and inconclusive conclusions, the forms and themes of the debate about the beliefs of a major writer. Collins's dissertation-like topic is informed with foreground and background research: his footnotes read as tellingly as his text and provide wide-ranging and perceptive quotation.

He considers the idea, derived from Richard Simpson, that the appearance of George Eliot's name on the title-pages of Scenes of Clerical …

George Eliot Birthday Luncheon, 19 November 2006- The Toast To The Immortal Memory, Adrian Litvinoff

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I was surprised, honoured and delighted by the invitation to join you today and propose the toast to the immortal memory of George Eliot. I am no George Eliot expert, or indeed scholar, although I am an enthusiast. She is, after all, Warwickshire's other world-class writer, and it is tempting to think how much better known she might have been in her home county had Shakespeare been born in Stoke-on-Trent, say, rather than Stratford-upon-Avon.

My first encounter with George Eliot was while taking' A' level English at school. I still recall my dawning surprise and admiration as I, an inexperienced …

The George Eliot Centenary Of 1919, Margaret Harris

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The centenary of George Eliot's birth in 1919 was recognized as an opportunity to commemorate her connection with the parts of Warwickshire where she was born and spent her early life. While her association with Coventry and Nuneaton had been noted during her lifetime and in obituaries, and emphasized again when George Eliot's Life as related in her letters and journals, arranged and edited by her husband J. W. Cross was published in 1885, there were some inhibitions about too enthusiastically claiming an agnostic libertine as a local celebrity. Both Nuneaton and Coventry chose to celebrate the centenary, and reconstruction …

Review Of Middlemarch In The Twenty-First Century, Karen Chase

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This set of eight original essays engages afresh with a novel that many readers might claim to know well, in such a way as to make 'the lights and shadows ... fall with a certain difference' (chap. xxi). Karen Chase is well-known for her own studies of George Eliot, not least George Eliot: 'Middlemarch' (1991). Here, she confines herself to an introductory essay, which cogently states the brief given to her contributors, to reflect on how Middlemarch can be read in the twenty-first century. 'Who besides Eliot has been better aware of the alteration of objects given a change in …

Review Of George Eliot And The Discourses Of Medievalism, Judith Johnston

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot and the Discourses of Medievalism argues that Eliot abandons realism in her last two novels in favour of medievalism, and that recognizing the presence and function of medieval discourses in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda enables subversive political readings. Johnston positions these readings against criticism of the novels that identifies a collapse of narrative coherence and characterization in Eliot's 'failure' to sustain their apparent realism. In contrast, Johnston proposes that Eliot's manipulation of medievalism signals neither the failure of realism nor realism's antithesis. Johnston argues that the discourses of medievalism that Eliot manipulates share a facility for transformation: hagiography …

Notes On Contributors- 2007

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.

Rosemary Ashton is Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London. She is the author of acclaimed critical biographies of George Eliot (1996) and G. H. Lewes (1991). Her many publications on George Eliot include The Mill on the Floss: A Natural History (1990), and editions of Middlemarch (Penguin, …

The Thirty-Fifth George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 2006- Glimpses Of Life At 142 Strand, Rosemary Ashton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

1. John Chapman and the Strand in 1847

24 July 1847 the following advertisement appeared in the weekly periodical, the Athenaeum:

MR CHAPMAN, Bookseller and Publisher, begs to announce that he has REMOVED his Business from 121 Newgate Street, to more spacious premises on the South side of the STRAND, No 142, a few doors West of Somerset House; and requests, therefore, that all communications may be forwarded to the latter address.

For the next seven years John Chapman's 'spacious premises' - consisting of the bookselling business and publishing house, his family home, and rooms for literary lodgers - was …

Literature In The Arid Zone, Thomas Lynch

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This chapter surveys and assesses from an ecocentric perspective some representative literary portrayals of the Australian deserts. Generally, it contrasts works that portray the desert as an alien, hostile, and undifferentiated void with works that recognise and value the biological particularities of specific desert places. It explores the literature of three dominant cultural orientations to the deserts: pastoralism, mining, and traversal. It concludes with a consideration of several multi-voiced and/or multi-genred bioregionally informed works that suggest fruitful directions for more ecocentric literary approaches.

Review Of Troubling Minds: The Cultural Politics Of Genius In The United States, 1840-1890 By Gustavus Stadler, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Though the title suggests it is, this book is not a cultural history of genius in the 19th-century US. Working in a high cultural-studies mode, Stadler (Haverford College) addresses questions like those addressed in a special issue of American Literature, "Aesthetics and the End(s) of Cultural Studies" (ed. by Christopher Castiglia and Russ Castronovo, v. 76, no. 3, September 2004). He uses an oddly assorted group of figures to map out a grand narrative of how the genius works to accommodate ordinary individuals to "the troubling, potentially shattering phenomena associated with modernity." In the first three chapters Stadler focuses …

Review Of Henry S. Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, And The Practical Spatial Arts, 1580–1630, Elizabeth Spiller

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, Henry Turner argues that English stage practice emerged out of practical geometry and related mechanical arts. The book is part of a new critical attention to the interconnections between literature and science, one that depends on the recognition that art involved the creation not just of aesthetic objects but also of knowledge itself. Stage practice drew from geometry to develop the concepts of plat-plot and to define its use of scenes as both spatial divisions and dramatic structures. Drama also provided audiences with forms of practical knowledge …

Review Of Imagining The Primitive In Naturalist And Modernist Literature By Gina M. Rossetti, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Rossetti (St. Xavier Univ.) argues that representations of characters as “primitives” in late 19th and early-20th century literary texts served to “limn the boundaries of American Identity.” Much like Walker Been Michaels in Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (CH, Mar’ 96, 33-3775), she focuses primarily on ways that literary representations seek to constitute the national family as white in the face of increasing numbers of ethnic and racial others. Rossetti brings an interesting set of nonliterary texts to this conversation, namely writings by late-19th- and early 20th-centruy sociologists and other cultural analysts, and the juxtapositions these provide allow interesting …

Reading With Your Ears: The Uses Of Opera In Literature, James E. Ford

Music and Literature Archive

In both the East and the West the relationship between opera and literature is ancient and profound. As the Disciples of the Pear Garden would know, many of the most popular works of the Beijing Opera are based on famous Chinese historical novels. And when a group of late Sixteenth-Century Italians created Western opera they were trying to revive Greek tragedy. (They knew that Greek tragedy was sung in some fashion and the speaking-to-music we know as recitiative was their attempt to reproduce that ancient practice.) Of course, many, many Western operas have been based on plays, novels, and short …

Major Literary Award Winners In The Medium-Sized Academic Library, Todd Spires

E-JASL: Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship (1999-2009, Volumes 1-10)

Abstract

This article addresses the role of major literary award-winning books and authors in the medium-sized academic library. It details a study performed at Bradley University’s Cullom-Davis Library in early 2006. The project surveyed award-winning books held by the library at the time of the study. The purpose of the survey was to evaluate past selection performance of these materials, to provide data on items that the library needs to acquire and to encourage library faculty to watch for and make use of literary and other prize winning materials. The article describes the thought-process involved, the actual workflow and the …

This Is My Idaho, Cynthia L. Struloeff

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This Is My Idaho is a collection of short stories set in or around the fictional town of Eagle City, Idaho, in southeast Idaho near the borders with Montana and Wyoming. There is a wildness in this part of the world, circled by high, unforgiving mountains, that resonates within the people there. The characters of this collection must hammer out their lives against this landscape. Some, like Mary in “What the Good Is,” and Ginny in “The Sugar Shell,” feel the mountains as a kind of barrier between them and the rest of the world and yearn to escape. Others, …

Identity And Authenticity: Explorations In Native American And Irish Literature And Culture, Drucilla M. Wall

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This collection explores of some of the many ways in which Native American, Irish, and immigrant Irish-American cultures negotiate the complexities of how they are represented as "other," and how they represent themselves, through the literary and cultural practices and productions that define identity and construct meaning. The core issue that each chapter examines is one of authenticity and the means through which this often contested and vexed notion is performed. The Irish and American Indian points of view which I explore are certainly not the only ones that shed light on this issue, but these are the ones I …

Allusive Mechanics In Modern And Postmodern Fiction As Suggested By James Joyce In His Novel Dubliners, Kynan D. Connor

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

James Joyce in his novel Dubliners conducts a series of narrative experiments with allusion, and in doing so suggests a new literary criticism based upon the allusive process. This new criticism of allusive mechanics considers the text in terms of its allusive potential for character—that is, the character is treated as capable of signification. Because Joyce can mimic the process of signification, it repositions the author to the act of writing and the reader to the act of reading. Character is greatly expanded through allusive mechanics because narrative elements like allusion in a text are treated as having a character-oriented …

Review Of Our Sisters' Keepers: Nineteenth-Century Benevolence Literature By American Women, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This volume of essays joins a small but growing body of work attempting to recuperate "benevolence" as an important concept for nineteenth century American literary history. As Susan Ryan observes in The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race 8 the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence, although sentimentality and benevolence are interrelated, the recent critical focus on sentimentality has tended to obscure the importance of benevolence as a nineteenth-century cultural category. While Ryan focuses on gender in addition to race, most of her primary literary figures are, nevertheless, male. The essays in this volume thus usefully supplement Ryan's volume, bringing another (and …

Review Of The Salt Roads By Nalo Hopkinson, Gregory E. Rutledge

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Although Samuel R. Delany, Jr. has been publishing sci-fi /fantasy since the 1960s and Octavia E. Butler since the 1970s, and both were included in and thus canonized by the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1999), still only a handful of Black novelists work the field. Not withstanding their canonization, their studied interpolation of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation into their novels, and the potential the genre has for shaping our hypertext, Internet-driven world, this state of affairs still obtains. Nevertheless these are heady times, as the other Black sci-fi novelists such as Jewell Gomez, Stephen Barnes, and …

Liberation Theology And Liberatory Pedagogies: Renewing The Dialogue, Shari J. Stenberg

Department of English: Faculty Publications

recent Chronicle of Higher Education column, Stanley Fish describes a phone call he received after the death of Jacques Derrida from a reporter who was curious as to what would succeed high theory as the "center of energy in the academy." "I answered like a shot," Fish writes, "religion" (1). For many, Fish's prophecy might create a feeling of uneasiness; after all, in academic culture, religious ideologies are often considered hindrances to-not vehicles for-critical thought. This feeling may be especially true in regard to Christianity, which is often conflated with conservative politics and fundamentalism both in and outside of the …

Chariman's Address At The Annual General Meeting Of The Fellowship, 11 March 2006, Bill Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

My Address at the AGM is usually concerned with our plans and hopes for the future but perhaps on this rather special day I may be allowed a glance at the past.

Last week I chaired a Council meeting for the last time; my first one was on 6 March 1971 - 35 years ago. When I succeeded Stan Dickens as Chairman in 1971 it was just two years after the remarkable success of the Fellowship's efforts to Commemorate the 150th anniversary of George Eliot's birth in 1969. That event became the foundation for our optimistic growth in the 1970s …

Laughing With George Eliot, R.J. Jenkins

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The tradition of admiring George Eliot for her genius is as old as the author herself. Alexander Main, one of her more sycophantic devotees, laid the foundations of this tradition during her lifetime with the publication of Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings, a work dedicated 'to George Eliot in recognition of a genius as original as it is profound and a morality as pure as it is impassioned'. Though Main confesses that the preface to his book is 'not the place in which to attempt to give an exposition of George Eliot's genius', he cannot resist using it to remind …

Costanza, Constance, Custance And Emare: Romola's Medieval Ancestry, Katherine Inglis

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Arguably the most problematic episode of Romola for the novel's reviewers and critics is Romola's imitation of Boccaccio's heroine Costanza (or Gostanza) in the two chapters 'Drifting Away' and 'Romola's Waking'; even Romola's most favourable early reviews censured the episode's structural and stylistic interruption. However, as Mark Turner and Caroline Levine have observed, the critical consensus has evolved from censure of 'an unseemly breach in the narrative' to reappraisal of a 'crucial site of interest'.' If an unwritten orthodoxy remains then it is a less value-laden sense that the chapters depart from the novel's overarching historical project. However, it is …

Imagination, Morality, And The Spectre Of Sade In George Eliot's Romola And Daniel Deronda, Margaux Fragoso

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In her final book, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, George Eliot vocalizes her contempt for writers who dismiss morality 'as a sort of twaddle for bibs and tuckers, a doctrine of dulness, a mere incident in human stupidity' (Impressions 134). It is well known that Eliot subscribed to a complex system of morals that each successive novel brings closer to fruition. Eliot's last novel Daniel Deronda is her closest inspection of the conflict between egoism and morality. It explores the psyche of a woman who is made to develop moral sensibilities: Gwendolen's 'bad' luck in marrying Grandcourt creates conditions that foster …

Review Of George Eliot And Victorian Attitudes To Racial Diversity, Colonialism, Darwinism, Class, Gender, And Jewish Culture And Prophecy, Brenda Mckay

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Brenda McKay's volume, George Eliot and Victorian Attitudes to Racial Diversity, Colonialism, Darwinism, Class, Gender, and Jewish Culture and Prophecy will most likely appear on most of our students' and colleagues' bibliographies for some time to come. The topics addressed in this book will clearly appeal to our current generation of scholars and budding scholars; McKay describes her book in the Prologue as being 'chiefly devoted' to the study of 'the race discourse' in Eliot's work. In addition, as the unwieldy title suggests, McKay tries to connect to this emphasis on race issues of 'Colonialism, Darwinism, Class, Gender, and Jewish …

Note On Contributors 2006

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Bill Adams has been Chairman of the Fellowship from 1971 until his retirement this year.

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.

Michael Baron is a Senior Lecturer in the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of a monograph on Wordsworth and articles on nineteenth and twentieth century poetry. He …

Review Of Adam Bede, Mary Waldron

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This Broadview edition of Adam Bede has a biographical and critical introduction, appropriately integrating G. H. Lewes into its discourse, and useful essays on some of the themes of the novel, - Religion, Love, Rank and Status. There are short summaries of selected critical commentaries from the contemporary to the current, including an appraisal of the feminist divide over George Eliot. The brief chronology is succeeded by a note on the text, here that of the First Edition with minor corrections/adjustments from the manuscript, footnoted throughout. The Appendices which follow it provide foreground and background to the novel, for example …

Address At Wreath-Laying In Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey, 30 June 2005, Sally Brown

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Not all great writers are great readers, but George Eliot certainly was. A voracious reader of other writers - Dante, Goethe, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Scott - she was also very fond of reading aloud. Her husband, John Walter Cross, praised her 'naturally rich, deep voice, rendered completely flexible by constant practice; with the keenest perception of the requirements of emphasis; and with the most subtle modulations of tone'. 'The Bible and our elder English poets,' he thought, best suited its 'organ-like' quality.

Reading aloud - now, sadly, an almost vanished pastime - was, of course, a customary one in Victorian …

Review Of George Eliot's Travels: Composite Characters And Coded Communications., Kathleen Mccormack

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

When we think of George Eliot, the word 'travels' is likely to suggest journeys to far-flung places in foreign lands, but considered in an English setting, she seems to be locked in either Warwickshire or London. Kathleen McCormack, however, shows how widely George Eliot travelled in her own country, so widely that she made over fifty visits to English places and only thirty to foreign destinations. Indeed, 'widely' is a word that stimulates Kathleen McCormack's imagination as she has revealed in an earlier work, George Eliot and Intoxication (2000), in which the last word, 'Intoxication', is interpreted in its widest …