English Language and Literature Commons^™

Editor's Notes

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

We wish to correct the following typographical errors that occurred in June Skye Szirotny's 'Edward Casaubon and Herbert Spencer' (George Eliot Review No. 32 [2001], pp. 29-43):

We wish to correct the following typographical errors that occurred in June Skye Szirotny's'Edward Casaubon and Herbert Spencer' (George Eliot Review No. 32 [2001], pp. 29-43):p. 31 , I. 31 after ). insert [sic 1p. 34, I. 11 for our read ourp. 35, I. 6 after 223). insert note 39a. See also n. 33 above.p. 36, I. 8 for L read GELI. 20 for L read GELp. 38, I. 5 for University read …

Developing Pedagogies: Learning The Teaching Of English, Shari J. Stenberg, Amy Lee

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Consider the following scenario: You arrive at graduate school in time for the three-day orientation, which consists of a series of workshop "training" to be a scholar. One half-day session covers the conference proposal and presentation; another trains new students to write seminar papers; a third focuses on the prospectus and dissertation; yet another teaches the composition articles for refereed journals. At the end of three days, you are ostensibly "trained" in the basics required to contribute to your profession as a scholar and researcher. While you might continue to develop these "skills" as you advance through exams, dissertations, and …

Intersecting Influences In American Haiku, Thomas Lynch

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In contemporary American haiku poetry we find a convergence of the tradition of the American transcendentalists, especially Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, with the Zen-influenced Japanese tradition of haiku composition. This convergence is most obvious in a shared belief in the ability of the poet to see the world anew, and in the desire to efface the subject/object dichotomy between the poet and the natural world. In the work of many North American poets, the transcendental and Zen traditions synthesize to generate a distinctive brand of haiku. Since the mid-1950s, literally thousands of collections of haiku poetry have appeared in the …

Writing The Public Sphere Through Family/Community History, Amy M. Goodburn

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Composition scholars recently have begun to call for a re-imagined role for compositionists as public intellectuals who participate in the public sphere. At the same time compositionists are increasingly advocating writing pedagogies that ask students to investigate and participate in the public sphere—via service learning projects, community-service writing, “real-world” writing for businesses and non-profi t agencies, and so on. Susan Wells, Elizabeth Ervin, Peter Mortensen, and Ellen Cushman all, to varying extents, have argued for compositionists to use their rhetorical expertise in public arenas. Wells, one of the most prominent advocates of writing in the public sphere, describes four ways …

Futurist Fiction And Fantasy: The Racial Establishment, Gregory E. Rutledge

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Futurist fiction and fantasy encompasses a variety of subgenres: hard science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, sword-and-sorcerer fantasy, and cyberpunk. Unfortunately, even though nearly a century has expired since the advent of futurist fiction and fantasy, Richard Pryor’s observation and a call for action is still viable. Despite the growing number of Black futurist fiction and fantasy writers, the proportion of Black futurist fiction and fantasy authors to White futurist fiction and fantasy authors is dismal. This disproportion means that Black futurist fiction and fantasy authors have a limited presence in the industry. Thus, although Black futurist fiction and fantasy authors …

"Every Body Sees The Theft": Fanny Fern And Literary Proprietorship In Antebellum America, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In Walden, Henry David Thoreau complained of what he believed to be the provincial reading habits of his Concord neighbors: "If we will read newspapers, why not skip the gossip of Boston and take the best newspapers in the world at once?- to not be sucking the pap of 'neutral family' papers, or browsing the 'Olive Branches' here in New England.” While Thoreau's own Week on the Concord and Merrinlack Rivers failed to find a national audience, he misreads (or willfully misrepresents) the potential geographic reach of authors who the Olive Branch, the weekly paper that launched Fanny …

A Trove Of New Works By Thomas Pynchon? Bomarc Service News Rediscovered, Adrian S. Wisnicki

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Early in 1960, after having graduated from Cornell and while writing V., Thomas Pynchon moved to Seattle and began working for the Boeing Airplane Company. What Pynchon did while working at Boeing has puzzled scholars almost from the moment of the very private author's literary debut. When we try to delve into his stint at Boeing first mentioned by Lewis Nichols and Dick Schaap--we reach dead ends or find conflicting information. Yet Pynchon's time at Boeing is perhaps the most documented period of his life, and over the years a number of interesting (though not always accurate) bits of information …

Review Of Oxford Reader's Companion To George Eliot, John Rignall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

For a reader of George Eliot, opening this Companion may be a bit like opening a box of chocolates. There is a pause as one wonders where to begin, but once begun, it is difficult to stop tasting and savouring the contents. The articles are written in a fluid and concise, easily readable style, and present such an abundance and particularity of detail that the most dedicated student of George Eliot's life and work will find new information and insights. And even where the facts are more or less familiar, details we may have forgotten remind us again of the …

Priest And Nun?: Daniel Deronda, Anti-Catholicism And The Confessional, Kirstie Blair

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In Chapter 32 of Daniel Deronda, Sir Hugo Mallinger jocularly remarks to Deronda, 'You are always looking tenderly at the women, and talking to them in a Jesuitical way. You are a dangerous young fellow'.' Deronda responds with undue irritation, drawing the narrative observation that, 'Sir Hugo's notion of flirting, it was to be hoped, was rather peculiar'. Both Deronda's defensive reaction and Eliot's sly comment hint at the potential dangers of 'peculiar' flirtation with Gwendolen, a peculiarity linked to the term 'Jesuitical'. In the pervasive late Victorian discourse of anti-Catholicism, Jesuit priests are associated with insinuation, deception, persuasion, and …

Opening Of The Garden At The George Eliot Hospital Nuneaton, 9 July 2000, Serena Evans

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

When I was asked to come here to open this lovely garden I wondered what on earth I could say about George Eliot that you hadn't thought, read, written or said already - and then I decided that I should talk about the one thing that you don't know about, and that is what has meant to be George Eliot's great- great- great-niece.

It wasn't a thing I questioned when I was little, it just was; at home the book shelves were full of leather bound volumes of her novels and the downstairs loo had pictures on the wall of …

Middlemarch And Belinda, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Middlemarch and Rhoda Broughton's Belinda (1883) have often been cited as benchmarks in the much wider debate concerning Mark Pattison and his wife Emily Francis, later Lady Dilke. Among other novels with alleged Pattison derivations are W. H. Mallock's The New Republic (1877), Mrs. Humphry Ward's Robert Elsmere (1888), and Robert Liddell's The Almond Tree (1938), the latter apparently deftly drawn from the Pattison papers in the Bodleian. Apologists occupying the Pattison patch include John Sparrow and Vivian Green,’ while Pattison's own Memoirs (1885) are essential to any understanding of this alternately admired and vilified man. In his George Eliot: …

Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative In Darwin, George Eliot, And Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Gillian Beer

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In Darwin s Plots, Gillian Beer writes that 'On the Origin of Species is one of the most extraordinary examples of a work which included more than the maker of it at the time knew, despite all that he did know'. Published in November 1859 with a print run of 1,250, Origin shook Victorian Britain. Its conclusions seemed inescapable. Life on earth was not the six-day product of a divine creator, but the outcome of random evolutionary process. Its impact was immediate and immense. Man 'was born yesterday - he will perish tomorrow' declared the Athenaeum. In later life Thomas …

Address At The Wreath-Laying In The George Eliot Memorial Garden, Nuneaton 18 June 2000

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

To be asked to lay a wreath and say a few words in celebration of George Eliot, the great authoress, is an honour, I am sure that most of you here today have much more knowledge and understanding of her life and works than I do, but having spent my childhood at Arbury and living there now with my wife and children, I believe that I have a small bond.

It is astounding to think that she, who is so much a part of the fabric of Arbury, is a world famous figure. Her talent was acknowledged during her lifetime …

Edward Casaubon And Herbert Spencer, June Skye Szirotny

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Identifying the originals of George Eliot's characters has always fascinated readers. And none of her characters has inspired speculation about an original more than Edward Casaubon, George Eliot's scholar and clergyman in Middlemarch. In 1973, Richard Ellmann published an essay, 'Dorothea's Husbands: Some Biographical Speculations' ,re-examining the claims made for various persons George Eliot had known, as the original of Casaubon: Mark Pattison, Herbert Spencer, Dr. Robert Herbert Brabant, Jacob Bryant, Robert William Mackay, and George Eliot herself. Since then readers have focused on other contenders, mostly literary figures. 2 Of the traditional contenders, Mark Pattison, a scholar who wrote …

Address Wreath-Laying In Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey 21 June 2000, Jonathan G. Ouvry

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

When Gabriel Woolf was standing here a few years ago, he told us the various things that he was not, in relation to George Eliot; for example, that he was not an author fresh from the triumph of the latest biography or other learned work, or an academic (though there I think he does himself an injustice). I too am not any of the things which very often distinguish the wreath laying guest on this important occasion in the George Eliot Fellowship's calendar. Among the many things which I am not, is any kind of blood relation of George Eliot. …

American Branch Report, Linda K. Roberston

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Dr. Linda K. Robertson reports that a small group of members and friends met for dinner in St. Louis, Missouri in November and it is hoped this might become a regular event. Vast distances preclude members in the USA meeting as a branch but there are at present 33 annual members there and 49 life members. One of the latter, George Griffith delivered a paper on 'George Eliot’s Photographed Face and the Gaze of Public Celebrity' at the conference of Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States in October. The parent Fellowship in England would welcome news of …

Review Of A Community Of Interest- The Story Of The George Eliot Fellowship 1930-2000, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On November 22nd 1930 an inaugural supper for the George Eliot Fellowship was held at the Newdegate Arms in Nuneaton, at which Sir Francis Newdegate GCMG of Arbury Hall presided. He told the assembled company that it was high time that those who lived Nuneaton should pay every honour they could to George Eliot. He went on to say 'I cannot myself speak of her writings as an expert, but I do know that she has done a great deal for the neighbourhood in the way she has reproduced Warwickshire as it was 100 years ago and has preserved the …

Nobody's Daughters: Dicken's Tattycoram And George Eliot's Caterina Sarti, Beryl Gray

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Doughty Street, where Dickens lived for three years (1836-9), is within a stone's throw of the site of London's Hospital for Foundling Children, which was established in 1739 by the retired sea-captain, Thomas Coram, whom Dickens venerated. Tavistock House - Dickens's home 1851-60, and where he wrote Little Dorrit, the novel in which Tattycoram appears - was also only a short walk from the Hospital.

Dickens entirely approved of the way the 'Foundling' was managed in his own day. The Household Words article 'Received, a Blank Child’,' which he co-authored with his sub-editor, W. H. Wills, unreservedly praises the establishment's …

Review Of Scenes Of Sympathy: Identity And Representation In Victorian Fiction "Without Any Check Of Proud Reserve": Sympathy And Its Limits In George Eliot's Novels, Audrey Jaffe, Ellen Argyros

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

These two books, when read together, make an exceedingly interesting comparative study of 'sympathy', that term so pervasive in George Eliot's work. Audrey Jaffe's book resituates the idea of 'sympathy' in the Foucauldian notions of spectacularization and surveillance, thus examining sympathy from a cultural studies perspective. She comments that her book is 'not an attempt to define sympathy per se ... this book rather exposes and explores the recurrent connection between sympathy, representation, and constructions of social identity in a series of Victorian texts' (8). Jaffe thus brings an entirely new perspective to bear on what critics and readers - …

George Eliot Birthday Luncheon, 19 November 2000 The Toast To The Immortal Memory, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Now I am in my thirty-second year as Secretary of the Fellowship, Bill and I can look back over those years and realize what an immense change they have made to our lives. When we joined the tiny Fellowship in 1965 we could have had no idea what was in store for us - the interesting things that have happened to us, the lovely people (some of them quite famous!) we have met, the friends we have made and the places we have been to, all because of that wonderful lady we are celebrating today.

My first contact with George …

Letter To The Editor, 2001, Barbara Hardy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The welcome purchase by the British Library of George Eliot / Jane Senior letters isn't always reported accurately. In a recent Woman's Hour Kathryn Hughes seemed to imply the correspondence was new to scholars. Haight's Yale Edition contains ten letters from George Eliot to Jane Senior, including three of the series in the news. The unpublished letters extend and stimulate existing knowledge. We shall discuss this and other subjects at a two-day symposium to be held at the University of London Institute of English Studies on 17-18 January 2002.

Annual Report 2000, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

2000, the Millennium Year, proved to be a mixture of success and some disappointment. The Fellowship Council planned many extra events for so auspicious a year; some were very successful, others were not. Indeed, many of us felt that the excitement of the Millennium had faded by the end of January!

The year began for us with the sad news of the death of our Patron, Viscount Daventry. Several members attended his funeral service at Astley ('Knebley') Church and we were also represented at the Memorial Service later in St Mary's Church in Warwick. Viscount Daventry had been our Patron …

The Twenty-Ninth George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 2000 "George Eliot For The Twenty-First Century: Middlemarch And The Poetry Of Prosaic Conditions", Barbara Hardy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Jerome Beaty should have given this lecture: 1 I have spoken and written in celebration of his scholarship and record that I was sad to be speaker not listener. Taking his amusingly grandiose title I place mine after it, and discussing Middlemarch and its poetry of (and in) prosaic conditions, respect his theme. I consider George Eliot's poetic language in Middlemarch at a time when many poets and novelists are interested in generic crossing and dislocation (as they have been in different ways from modernism to post-modernism) but when critics are less concerned with George Eliot's art, and literary art …

Review Of George Eliot And Victorian Historiography: Imagining The National Past, Memory And History In George Eliot: Transfiguring The Past, Neil Mccaw, Hao Li

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Two recent books address the important subject of how and why George Eliot represents history in her fiction. Neil McCaw's George Eliot and Victorian Historiography is concerned primarily with Eliot's relationship to Victorian history writing - to the historians, theories and ideologies that shaped the way Victorians understood and reconstructed an English national past. Hao Li's Memory and History in George Eliot aims to understand Eliot's conception of the 'mechanisms and functions' of 'communal memory' in relation to history. Li draws on Victorian physiological and psychological theories of memory, as well as on twentieth-century thinking about the relationship between memory …

Women Musicians In Victorian Fiction, 1860-1900: Representations Of Music, Science, And Gender In The Leisured Home, Phyllis Weliver

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The title and subtitle of this book must intrigue anybody who ·takes an interest in the cultural background of nineteenth-century literature. The familiarly stereotypical figures of the 'accomplished' Victorian girl at her piano, the evolutionary scientist and the domestic hearth where they might meet have often been analysed - and questioned. In fact, Phyllis Weliver's chapter on sensation fictions shows the seductive, female demon lurking behind the deceptively correct musical performances of two 'fallen' heroines. In East Lynne, the protagonist, who is to abandon her husband and children to live abroad in shame, starts out playing hymns, and Lady Audley …

The George Eliot Review: Journal Of The George Eliot Fellowship 2001 No. 32, Beryl Gray, John Rignall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

CONTENTS

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

ADDRESSES Viscount Daventry: Address at the wreath-laying in the George Eliot Memorial Gardens, 18 June 2000 ................................................ 7

Jonathan Ouvry: Address at the wreath-laying in Westminster Abbey, 21 June 2000 ........................................................................... 9

Serena Evans: Address at the opening of a garden at the George Eliot Hospital in Nuneaton, 9 July 2000 .................................................. .11

Barbara Hardy: The Twenty-Ninth George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 21 October 2000...................... 13

Kathleen Adams: The Toast to the Immortal Memory: George Eliot Birthday Luncheon, 19 November 2000 .......................................... 23

ARTICLES June Skye Szirotny: Edward Casaubon and Herbert Spencer (Prize Essay) ..............................29 …

Japanese Branch Report 2000, Yukiko Ono

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The fourth annual convention of the George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at Kinki University in Osaka on Saturday, 25 November 2000.

The morning session began with a welcome speech by Norio Murase, Dean of the Literature Department of Kinki University. He said, 'George Eliot seems to be similar to Nukada-noookimi, a famous poet of Mayoshu, the oldest collected Japanese verses, in the seventh century, not in appearance, but in abundance of feeling.'

The first paper, 'Clothing in Janet's Repentance', was presented by Masae Ukawa, a full-time lecturer at Kurashiki University of Science and the Arts. She observed the …

The Ethics Of Students’ Community Writing As Public Text, Amy M. Goodburn

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Th is chapter examines some of the ethical dilemmas I have faced when students make public their writing about community projects. Like many other compositionists (Bacon 1997; Herzberg 1994; Minter et al. 1995; Peck et al. 1995), I value community projects/service learning as a way for students to connect their academic learning with contexts beyond the classroom, and I view students’ writing about their learning in these contexts as critical for help ing them make sense of oftentimes confusing and contradictory experiences. One way that I value this writing in the classroom is by incorporating it as a public text, …

Pockets Of Stones, Thomas Lynch

Department of English: Faculty Publications

We stand beneath a hard blue bowl, carved and polished turquoise to a flawless sheen. Well no, it's just the sky, because when I turn around, there's the bright autumn sun.

This warm October day the boys and I take the trail towards Dripping Springs, then swing north on the Crawford trail, past the ruins of the Modoc mine and mill. Beyond the mill site, the trail turns east, straight at the sheer walled mountains, passes into a boulder-choked defile and then stops abruptly at a smooth and curved cliff face--damp with a delicate trickle of water. It's a box …

Introduction To The Great Gatsby (Wordsworth Editions), Guy J. Reynolds

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The 'constant flicker' of the American scene

Why is The Great Gatsby such a quintessential twentieth-century novel? After mixed reviews and a slow start in sales, Fitzgerald's 1925 novel has moved to the centre of literary history, to the extent that to many readers this is the modern American novel. Gatsby is widely loved, and has achieved the unusual status of appealing to both that mythical creature the 'Common Reader' and an academic audience. The novel's stature has increased exponentially with age, and it is probably regarded with more fondness and read with greater critical sophistication today than in the …