English Language and Literature Commons^™

Legitimate Plots, Private Lots In Felix Holt And Daniel Deronda, Bonnie Shannon Mcmullen

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

A preoccupation with the idea of home was central to George Eliot's fiction from its beginnings until its end. In Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda, however, this theme is developed in terms that involve legal complexities that have embroiled her characters, perplexed her readers, and sent the author to seek advice and reassurance from the barrister Frederic Harrison. Esther Lyon has a 'right in remainder'! in a property, while Harold Transome has 'a reversion tantamount to possession' (p. 284), Sir Hugo Mallinger is a tenant for life, his nephew Grandcourt a tenant in tail. These intricacies of plot have puzzled …

George Eliot Birthday Lucheon, 21 November 2004 The Toast To The Immortal Memory, Rosemary Ashton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a special year because it is ISO years since George Eliot and G. H. Lewes began to live together openly. 22 November 1854 was her thirty-fifth birthday. Where were she and Lewes? What were they doing?

They were in Berlin, having moved on from Weimar on 3 November. They had left England on 19 July, the day Marian Evans sent her famous telegram to her Coventry friends Charles and Cara Bray and Sara Hennell:

Dear Friends - all three

I have only time to say good bye and God bless you. Poste Restante, Weimar

for …

Review Of Social Stories: The Magazine Novel In Nineteenth-Century America And Blue Pencils And Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals, 1830–1910, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Patricia Okker’s study of serialized novels nineteenth-century American magazines is elegantly conceived and executed. Beginning her chronological case studies with the serialization of Jeremy Belknap’s The Foresters (1787) in the Columbian Magazine, Okker takes as her central analytic framework the relationship between parts and whole, considering both the relationship of parts of magazine novels to the whole magazine in which they appear and the connection of individuals to the whole collectivity of American nationalism(s). The Columbian Magazine, for instance, published the U.S. Constitution alongside an installment of The Foresters, and in his novel, Belknap sought to demonstrate …

The Publishing History Of Augusta Jane Evans's Confederate Novel Macaria: Unwriting Some Lost Cause Myths, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In his 1884 Memoir Fifty Years among Authors, Books and Publishers, New York publisher J. C. Derby, who had published Augusta Jane Evans's second novel, Beulah, in 1859, gives an account of the publishing history of Evans's third novel, Macaria. Both the facts he recounts and his interpretation of those facts have been taken as largely accurate, appearing repeatedly in scholarly analyses of Evans's life and works. This essay argues that Derby's account is a romanticized, factually inaccurate account of wartime events from a post- Reconstruction perspective.

At The Edge Of The Circle: Willa Cather And American Arts Communities, Andrew W. Jewell

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

During the pivotal years of Willa Cather's artistic development, she regularly engaged a variety of American arts communities that encouraged, challenged, and influenced her work and professional growth. Her interactions with these communities were an effort to locate a sustainable, meaningful relationship to her fellow artists. This dissertation explores her efforts by analyzing the character of the communities, chronicling Cather’s involvement within them, and interpreting the impact on Cather’s life and work.

After the Introduction, the chapters are organized to follow Cather as she experimented with various communal forms and developed her own relationship to the literary scene. Chapter one …

Review Of American Literature And The Culture Of Reprinting And Forgotten Readers: Recovering The Lost History Of African American Literary Societies, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Both these volumes demonstrate the exciting potential, as well as the pitfalls, of applying history-of-the-book methodologies to American literary history in ways that complicate traditional author-centered paradigms. In American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, Meredith McGill focuses on the logic that drove publishers, legislators, and readers to resist an author-driven copyright law for much of the nineteenth century, brilliantly overturning pieties about the “failure” of the law to do justice to authors and analyzing “unauthorized” reprinting as a system functional on its own terms, rather than criticizing it as dysfunctional in contrast to the later proprietary system imagined …

A Critical Reading And Revision Strategy: Glossing Arguments As Cultural Work, Deborah Minter, Amy M. Goodburn

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Recently compositionists have focused on how writing functions both rhe­torically and culturally in the public sphere. Amy Lee (2000), for ex­ample, frames her booklength discussion of college composition in an understanding that “writing serves as the means by which we actively construct a self and a world that are, in turn, determined by the very language we have access to” (pp. 45-46; see also Berlin, 1996; Ervin, 1999; Wells, 1996). Such a view places pressure on writing teachers to develop generative activities that extend students’ existing capacities to summarize and analyze arguments. One activity that we’ve found useful is glossing. …

English 354: Advanced Composition: Writing Ourselves/Communities Into Public Conversations, Amy M. Goodburn, Heather Camp

Department of English: Faculty Publications

English 354: Advanced Composition is a required course for undergraduate majors in English, broadcast journalism, criminal justice, and pre-service English education, among others, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, a research-one, land-grant institution with a student population of about 24,000. English 354 focuses on “intensive study and practice in writing non-fi ction prose” and has a prerequisite of at least one 200-level writing course.

In Writing Ourselves/Communities into Public Conversations, our students explore public and private arguments and analyze how arguments are made within each (overlapping) sphere. We want them to consider the varying and sometimes competing strategies used to construct …

Review Of Gender And The Victorian Periodical, Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green, Judith Johnston

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

'We are dominated by Journalism' 'a really remarkable power', Oscar Wilde observed, not entirely neutrally, in 'The Soul of Man under Socialism' published in the Fortnightly Review in 1891. Like many of his contemporaries, Wilde recognized not only the power of the press, but also its modernity. In this wide ranging and important study Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green and Judith Johnston argue that precisely because of its power the periodical press occupied a central position in the construction of gender in Victorian cultural history.

Journalism was gendered masculine by those who accorded it a lofty status within the profession of …

The Exceptional Woman And Her Audience: Armgart, Performance, And Authorship

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Mirah, the Alcharisi, Gwendolen, Dinah, and Rosamond are all, to various degrees, performing women. Eliot's grandest diva, however, is also her least studied. The opera singer Armgart takes centre stage in the poetic closet drama of the same name that Eliot wrote in 1861. A focused study of an exceptional woman, Armgart conveys both Eliot's belief in the dangers of the influence of public opinion and her belief that exceptionally talented women could gain power through interacting with audiences. Armgart demonstrates that Eliot advocated for community among exceptional women and ordinary women. Finally, Armgart's examination of the talented female performer …

Address At Wreath-Laying In The George Eliot Memorial Garden, Nuneaton 8 June 2003, Catherine Nisbet

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It is now I suppose more than six months since Kathleen asked me to deliver this address and whilst I have given the task much thought, it is only now, a few days before the event, that I am committing myself to paper. I followed my usual course when faced with any task at the museum. I've thought a great deal around the subject often in the middle of the night or on my commute to and from work. I have done my research, scanned books, looked at previous examples and most important of all talked to other people who …

Notes On Contributors 2004

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.

Beryl Gray teaches literature at the Faculty of Continuing Education, Birkbeck College. She is the author of George Eliot and Music (1989) and many articles on George Eliot. Her current project concerns the figure of the dog in Victorian Culture.

Barbara Hardy is Emeritus Professor of English, University of London, and her …

Review Of Dead From The Waist Down. Scholars And Scholarship In Literature And The Popular Imagination, A.D. Nuttall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In this book, which derives its title from Browning's poem 'A Grammarian's Funeral', Professor Nuttall seeks to explore the profound change that he believes took place in the popular conception of scholars (Knowers') and scholarship between the Renaissance when Faustus was seen as an excitingly powerful figure, definitely 'sexy' as the current phrase goes, and the Nineteenth Century when the scholar became a representative of 'sexless deathliness'. Nuttall believes that a qualification needs to be made, however, in that from Francis Bacon onwards the Knower figure was split into two, the scientist and the scholar, with the former retaining elements …

Review Of Austen, Eliot, Charlotte Bronte And The Mentor-Lover, Patricia Menon

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Patricia Menon's title may be cumbersome, but her theme of the lover who becomes the instructor, guide and judge is a fascinating one. In her Prologue, she finds the 'mentor-lover' in Richardson's Pamela, Rousseau's Emile, Dryden's adaptation of Ovid's Pygmalion and Galatea, and the mediaeval letters between Abelard and Heloise which were widely read in the eighteenth century. She also sees a keen interest in moral judgements in those proliferating 'conduct-books' which sought to regulate behaviour, promote the right education for middleclass women and the right attitude to love and marriage. Such anxious concern with orderly living was intensified by …

The Thirty-Second George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 2003; What's In A Name: Competing Claims To The Authority Of George Eliot, Pam Hirsch

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The contentious issue of fame, infamy, and notoriety is the issue at stake in this lecture. On the one hand I focus attention on a tiny moment at the beginning of George Eliot's career, but argue that its gendered implications remain provocative. It acts as a test case of how nineteenth-century women writers had to justify the 'unfeminine' attribute of ambition. It also tells us something about the double standards operating in the reception of fiction by male and female writers.

On 1 February 1859 literary history was made with the publication of a novel called Adam Bede. A chorus …

Toast To George Eliot Birthday Luncheon, 23 November 2003; The Toast To The Immortal Memory, Rosalind Shanks

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Foreword: I have written the following speech after I delivered it - long after. Much thought went into the preparation. However I did not want to read at the lunch, I wanted to talk. I spoke with only skeletal notes and a script of 'The Female Shakespeare, so to speak' to hand in case I dried. I may have forgotten things that I actually said and included things that I meant to say on the day and didn't - my apologies. I did not expect the Toast to be printed.

Toast

Why am I here? That is not a philosophical …

Basil And Vampire: Fears Of Dissection In Middlemarch, Keiji Yata

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In the final chapter of George Eliot's Middlemarch, after describing the death of Lydgate and Rosamond's subsequent second marriage to 'an elderly and wealthy physician', the narrator tells us that Lydgate

once called her his basil plant; and when she asked for an explanation, said that basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man's brains. (Finale; 513)

Rosamond is, before marrying Lydgate, 'admitted to be the flower of Mrs. Lemon's school, the chief school in the county' (11; 62). Now her husband uses a different metaphor. In what sense can Lydgate consider himself 'murdered'?

Tertius Lydgate …

Review Of The Mills On The Floss: George Eliot & Le Moulin Sur La Floss, Alain Jemeau

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Writing to her first French translator, Francois d' Albert-Durade, in 1865, George Eliot remarked on how little known his translations appeared to be in France, since she was always being approached by people who wanted to translate her works into French. After her death d' Albert-Durade's La Famille Tulliver: ou le Moulin sur la Floss did go on to be reprinted several times from the late nineteenth century onwards, but it has now been superseded by a new translation by Alain Jumeau which will have more appeal to modem readers and will certainly reach a far wider audience than d' …

Annual Report 2003, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The Fellowship year always begins with the Annual General Meeting and in 2003 we amended our Constitution to exclude our Vice Presidents from the management team. This was because the Charity Commission rule that all members of the Fellowship Council are automatically trustees of the charity, and are unable to receive any payment from the Fellowship. This meant that we could not pay any of them for lectures, readings etc - an unacceptable situation. All the Vice Presidents were happy with this decision and we still keep them closely in touch with our affairs through the Minutes of the Council's …

'That Vankyke Duchess': Portraiture And Epic In Daniel Deronda, Susannah Rutherglen

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Portraits abound in Daniel Deronda - not only on the drawing-room walls of the Grandcourts and Mallingers, and in the 'grave Holbein faces' of the Meyrick family lithographs, but also in the actions and physiognomies of the novel's characters themselves. Daniel, in whom 'the family faces of various types, seen on the walls of the gallery, found no reflex' (166), nonetheless 'had that sort of resemblance to the preconceived type which a finely individual bust or portrait has to the more generalized copy left our minds after a long interval' (479).1 Gwendolen, 'that Vandyke duchess of a beauty' (558), sees …

'That Most Despicable Travesty Of A Women': Eliza Lynn Linton And Elma Stuart, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The George Eliot Collection in Nuneaton Library includes a previously unpublished letter written by Elma Stuart, one of George Eliot's greatest admirers. It was written in response to a critical and spiteful article about George Eliot in 1895 by Eliza Lynn Linton in the journal The Woman at Home. It was inevitable that the vicious article would antagonize Elma, who was so besotted with her idol that she had engraved upon the headstone on her grave in Highgate Cemetery in London - and next to George Eliot's own grave .... 'whom for 8'h blessed years George Eliot called by the …

Japanese Branch Report 2003, Yoshei Abe

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The seventh annual convention of the George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at Nihon University in Tokyo, on Saturday 29 November 2003.

The morning session began with an opening address by Kimitaka Hara, a vice-president of the Japanese Branch and a professor at Nihon University. In the morning, three members read their papers under the chairmanship of Noriko Kubota, a professor at Tsuru Bunka University and Kyoko Kishimoto, a professor at Kyoto Sangyo University.

The first paper, "'The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton" - the beginning of conflict' was presented by Naomi Ohno, a lecturer at Toyo …

Review Of Rereading George Eliot: Changing Responses To Her Experiments In Life, Bernard J. Paris

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

While he was still writing his doctoral thesis, which became his influential Experiments in Life: George Eliot's Questfor Values (1965), Paris fully accepted the rhetoric in Eliot's fiction that is designed to shape our moral and intellectual responses to her characters. By rhetoric Paris means not just Eliot's 'authorial commentary but titles, chapter headings, epigraphs, characters' observations about one another, the use of foils and juxtapositions, and a wide variety of stylistic and tonal devices ... ' (p.15). All of these combine to persuade us to see her characters maturing, becoming wiser, more often than not through painful bouts of …

The Two Timothy Coopers, Barbara Hardy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Once or twice when I read and re-read the scene of the railway survey in Middlemarch I felt a sense of niggling lost connection, then one day I belatedly found it. George Eliot had copied the name of Elizabeth Gaskell's Timothy Cooper, in Cousin Phillis, for her character in Middlemarch.

Eliot wrote to Gaskell1 that she felt an affinity with 'the feeling which inspired "Cranford" and the earlier chapters of "Mary Barton'" and had read Cranford when writing Scenes of Clerical Life and Mary Barton when writing Adam Bede. When The Moorland Cottage was proposed as source for The Mill …

Review Of Forming The Collective Mind: A Contextual Exploration Of Large-Scale Collaborative Writing In Industry, By Geoffrey A. Cross., Barbara Couture

Department of English: Faculty Publications

We have come a long way in studies of writers in professional settings, learning with each exploration how these behaviors differ from and relate to the processes we have taught beginning writers in our classroom. Studies of these processes have become increasingly more sophisticated since Selzer (1983) treated researchers to his intriguing account of a technical writer’s composing processes. Next, we saw case studies of writers designed to produce real-world writing contexts for students—such as Cases for Technical and Professional Writing, which I coauthored with Rymer Goldstein (1985)—and then more detailed descriptions of how writers learn to become proficient communicators …

Review Of Perspectives On American Book History: Artifacts And Commentary, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Perhaps the best place to begin a review of this excellent new book is where the editors themselves begin in their preface, by defining what the book is not. Namely, it is not "a reader that merely reprint[s] scholarly essays" on the history of the book (that niche has recently been filled by The Book History Reader [2002] from Routledge), nor is it "a definitive history of the book and print culture in North America" (Cambridge University Press and the American Antiquarian Society aim to fill that niche with the multi-volume History of the Book in America, currently in …

Willa Cather As Equivocal Icon, Guy J. Reynolds

Department of English: Presentations

All icons are ultimately equivocal: you can’t think of an icon without thinking about iconoclasm. Iconicity is a function of place. Cather turned the creation of icons, and the sceptical deconstruction of icons, into a form of narrative quest that could animate a whole fiction. After Cather’s death, her coterie, Midwesterners who had come East, were faced with what to make of an iconic heartlands figure who had moved to this re¬gion. Cather’s status as Midwestern icon became, after her death, a subject of struggle among E.K Brown, his widow Peggy Brown, Dorothy Canfield, Edith Lewis, Alfred Knopf, Leon Edel, …

The Ethics Of Representation, Robert Brooke, Amy M. Goodburn

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Editors' Introduction to a special issue of Writing on the Edge: A Journal About Writing and Teaching Writing

We compositionists work in a field where questions about the ethics of representation confront us endlessly. In our teaching, in our research, in our service, we regularly must represent students, colleagues, and community members to others, often across great divides in power. In response, across our profession there's been a growing sense of worry, and growing scholarship on the importance of ethical practices. In February 2001, CCC published the "Guidelines for the Ethical Treatment of Students and Student Writing in Composition Studies" …

Truth In Timbre: Morrison's Extension Of Slave Narrative Song In Beloved, Peter J. Capuano

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In her 1987 novel Beloved, Toni Morrison acknowledges and even borrows from Frederick Douglass's 1845 Narrative, but she also makes a resolute break from its rhetorical and political objectives. Historical differences between the audiences of Douglass and Morrison account for a large part of their contrasting styles, particularly in their treatment of slave song. Since Douglass composed his Narrative as a fugitive slave in the early 1840s, he was aware of his principally white audience and also of his precarious task of presenting an attack not on white America, but on the institution of slavery itself. Douglass's judicious …

The Politics Of Cather’S Regionalism: Margins, Centers And The Nebraskan Commonwealth, Guy Reynolds

Department of English: Presentations

Willa Cather remains a central figure in literary regionalism because she puts the central tenets of regionalism under intellectual pressure. One of the most familiar ways of thinking about American regions has been to think about an opposition between ‘section’ and ‘region’. Region tends to be used to define a geographical area, whereas a section denotes political or cultural identity. Cather is almost a sectionalist in her focus on the cultural and intellectual distinctiveness of the Nebraskan Commonwealth; but the very term itself links Nebraska to Virginia, rupturing a simple sense of section. Cather has a geographer’s sense of regional …