Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Review Of Victorian Narratives Of The Recent Past: Memory, History, Fiction, Helen Kingstone

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The nineteenth century saw a number of ways in which amateurs and professional historians and novelists approached the presentation of history, especially histories of the recent past. Eminent, professional historians at universities, and those aspiring to join them, increasingly avoided commenting on periods within living memory on the grounds that one could quickly lose credibility debating subjects not yet fully digested. Kingstone clearly illustrates the point in chapter 9, Conclusions: writing 'both before and after the United Kingdom's 2016 referendum decision to leave the European Union, I am aware that any arc I try to draw, any judgment I try …

Review Of The World Of Mr Casaubon: Britain's War Of Mythography, Colin Kidd

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The title of this book is interesting, as the subtitle describes what it is about but the main title refers to a fictional character from Middlemarch, part of a novel recently voted the greatest in English. Such a title makes the book much more marketable to a general audience and more likely to be reviewed in some of the broadsheets than a title which indicates that this is a book that 'venture[s] into the thickets of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antiquarianism' (vi). But the downside of the more appealing title is that readers who expect Middlemarch to play a central role …

Review Of The Transferred Life Of George Eliot: The Biography Of A Novelist, Philip Davis

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

There have been several good new biographies of George Eliot in recent years but none quite like this. Davis's subtle and searching analysis focuses almost exclusively on the writing as he traces the complex ways in which the experience of Mary Ann, or later Marian, Evans is 'transferred', to use the term of his title, into the creation of George Eliot and her work. The first life of relative failure, unhappiness and unsuccessful relationships is transformed into a second life as George Eliot, successful novelist and woman of letters, and this closely written and argued study explores the relationship between …

Radical Politics In The 1860s: The Writing Of Felix Holt, David Paterson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

While Felix Halt the Radical was being written there was a transformation in the atmosphere surrounding further parliamentary reform in Britain. In March 1865, when George Eliot began the novel, the Liberal Prime Minister Palmerston remained cautious about an extension of the franchise. Yet Felix Holt was finished on 31 May 1866 amidst great political excitement: a Reform Bill was being debated and the outcome uncertain. This change in emphasis in the political mood had its effect on Eliot 's writing, since the 'reform campaign had not gained enough momentum' I to explain Eliot's initial choice of subject. To say …

Against Egology: Ethics And Style In George Eliot And Emmanuel Levinas, Athanassia Williamson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I will argue that the ethical pluralism characteristic of Eliot's late writings anticipates Levinas's rejection of legislative, deontological ethics in the early 1960s, especially from Totality and Infinity (1961) onward. Both Eliot and Levinas problematize an intellectualist or theoretical ethics that fails to attend to our moral experience as an embodied and affective process. They are both sceptics of their inheritances of moral theory, and in their work attempt self-consciously to re-orient or reconstruct that inheritance. For Eliot, Feuerbach is a major encouragement to rethinking the grounds for moral agency; for Levinas, it is the philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger …

'A Being Apart': Sympathy And Distance In Middlemarch, Charlie Tyson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I wish to contend that Eliot in Middlemarch (1871-2) frequently tries to attenuate the sympathy that we, her readers, feel for her characters, and that this process of attenuation relies on emphasizing, rather than diminishing, forms of distance between reader and character. She checks our sympathies through techniques of visual staging that press her characters farther away from us in our imagined fields of vision, and through philosophical commentary that emphasizes the commonplace nature of the yearnings and sufferings these characters experience, instead of allowing us to see those circumstances as highly particularized. Despite the standard moral-philosophical observation that sympathy …

Felix Holt And 'A Fine Sight Of Lawsuits', Sheila Woolfe

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

During the festivities surrounding the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, much was said about his Warwickshire roots, and commentators noted, not for the first time, his use of Warwickshire dialect. The same is frequently said about George Eliot, of course. A good example occurs early in Felix Holt, in the coachman's words as he takes passengers up the hill past the village of Little Treby:

How many times in the year, as the coach rolled past the neglected-looking lodges which interrupted the screen of trees, and showed the river winding through a finely-timbered park, had the coachman answered the same …

Chairman's Annual Report For 2016, John Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The most noteworthy events of 2016 were the deaths of Bill and Kathleen Adams, a couple whose extraordinary dedication and hard work from 1968 until 2008 enabled the Fellowship to prosper and become a genuinely influential literary society. Bill was the first to die, just a couple of days after laying the wreath for us in June in Nuneaton, an event he loved, and where he met and chatted to so many old friends.

The AGM in March saw the existing team of Council members renewing their positions, with a request from Hon. Treasurer Jill Bridgewater that we should find …

In Memoriam, Kathleen Adams (1929-2016), John Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The sheer number of years, forty, that Kathleen Adams was Secretary of the George Eliot Fellowship, is extraordinary, but that number does not do justice to the prodigious amount of time, energy and dedication that she devoted to the job.

Like many others, Kathleen came to George Eliot via her life rather than her works. As a grammar school girl from Barrs Hill in Coventry she had heard about Eliot; as an adult she learned details of her extraordinary life. That took her to the novels and then a commitment to tell people about them which was to dominate her …

Living With George Eliot: A Tribute To My Parents, Will Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It was a strange but much-appreciated honour to be asked to address the annual George Eliot Fellowship lunch in 2016. It was strange because I'd attended many such events long ago - fewer more recently - and had always sat with the 'rank and file' on the lower tables while Mum and Dad, officers and distinguished guests occupied the top table. So, when on Sunday 20 November, I rose to speak, I was quite miffed to find that there was no top table! All very egalitarian, but it left me wandering up and down the floor as I imparted my …

Kathleen And Bill Adams - Memories Of Old Friends, Michael Harris, Ruth Harris

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

About 55 years ago when we were engaged to be married, Ruth came down from Scotland to Coventry for a holiday, and I was concerned to demonstrate to her that Warwickshire had much to offer to the visitor and prospective resident. Having, as I thought, exhausted the possibilities of Coventry, Kenilworth, Warwick etc., I asked her if there was anywhere else she would like to visit. I ought not to have been surprised, knowing that she had an English degree and was an English teacher, when she expressed a wish to discover more about George Eliot. So we took the …

Kathleen Adams: A Tribute, Gabriel Woolf

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

All but 50 years we knew each other. And I think George Eliot owes Kathleen Adams a lot. This is common knowledge - for where would the Fellowship be without her tireless efforts. Westminster Abbey, the Nuneaton statue, membership numbers: these are all well known. But that small terrace house in Stepping Stones Road, Coventry, visited by so many important figures, represents for me the championing of the ordinary folk and their appreciation of George Eliot's work. I remember an American academic being disappointed at the Newsletter Kathleen prepared so diligently, and how it was not on the intellectual level …

Japanese Branch Report, Masako Kimura

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On 10 December 2016, the Twentieth Annual Convention of The George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held in Otani University. The morning session, moderated by Hiroshi Oshima (Hyogo University of Teacher Education), began with an opening address by Yoriko Murase (Otani University). Thereafter, two papers were presented. The first paper 'The Influence of Adam Smith's Discussion of Sympathy on George Eliot: Reading Si/as Marner with The Theory of Moral Sentiments' was read by Chiyo Fujiwara (Kobe College). The second paper 'Women's Education inAdam Bede' was read by Chiyuki Kanamaru (Aichi Bunkyo University).

Fight For Equality, Edgar A. Ruiz-Guaderrama

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

The great author Jane Austen lived during a time period in which there was a patriarchal society installed which made it quite difficult for women rights similar to the Victorian Era. Both in Jane Austen’s society and the Victorian Era, there were huge gaps in gender equality. The society at the time made it easy for men to run everything that happened in society which in turn lead to women being at a huge disadvantage.Jane Austen showed people many examples of this inequality in her book Pride and Prejudice It is crucial as a society to improve from and correct …

Narrative Pleasures And Feminist Politics: Popular Women’S Historical Fiction, 1990-2015, Victoria Kennedy

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This dissertation contributes to a developing body of work on women’s historical fiction and its significance to feminist discourse. Building from Diana Wallace’s 2005 study The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900-2000, I offer a modified definition of “the woman’s historical novel” and a transatlantic consideration of several of the most popular titles in the contemporary period, including The Other Boleyn Girl (2001), Outlander (1991), A Great and Terrible Beauty (2003), and Scarlett (1991). Several studies have followed Wallace’s, notably Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn’s Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women’s Writing (2007) and Katherine Cooper and Emma …

“I Know You Want It”: Teaching The Blurred Lines Of Eighteenth-Century Rape Culture, Emily J. Dowd-Arrow, Sarah R. Creel

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

“‘I Know You Want It’: Teaching the Blurred Lines of Eighteenth-Century Rape Culture” is a collaborative pedagogical article that addresses the problem of so-called “post-feminism” in the contemporary college classroom by way of a comparative approach to eighteenth-century literature. Specifically, we contextualize and compare the early and late work of Eliza Haywood with current cultural debates and events in order to demonstrate not only the relevance of Haywood and eighteenth-century writers like her, but the importance of continuing the feminist conversation. The article provides texts, readings, and discussion points for consideration, as well as links to relevant contemporary issues and …

"Good To Think With": Women And Exempla In Four Medieval And Renaissance English Texts, Jennifer Fish Pastoor

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines four English texts—Beowulf; Ancrene Wisse; Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales’ Man of Law’s Tale and Second Nun’s Tale; and Richard Hyrde’s English translation, The Instruction of a Christen Woman, of Juan Luis Vives’ De Institutione Feminae Christianae—in terms of their use of exempla related to women. These texts all find women good “to think with,” to use, from The Body and Society, Peter Brown’s appropriation of Levi-Strauss’s famous wordplay. The ways in which these Old English, Middle English, and modern English texts portray women’s lives and bodies as a gateway into thought about the Christian life are also …

Bad Girls In Corsets: Women And The Transgressive Body In The Nineteenth Century, Colleen Warwick Green

Open Access Dissertations

Women, and their bodies, posed an increasing anxiety for Victorian society. Culturally and outwardly, the Victorian era strove to maintain a level of decorum that, increasingly, the nineteenth-century woman were, rebelling against. The urge for women to break through social barriers and constraints binding them to the century created a divergence in thought from the traditional mores of the past, in turn affecting the ways in which womens’ bodies were portrayed, displayed and manipulated by the authors and artists of the century.

As women entered actively entered into spaces once closed to them, they furthered the rift of uncertainty and …

The Uprising Of The Anecdotes: Women’S Letters And Mass-Produced News In Jacob’S Room And Three Guineas, Ria Banerjee

Publications and Research

This short article explores the similarities between Walter Benjamin's theory about the disruptive potential of an anecdote vis-a-vis the conventional narrative and Virginia Woolf's use of anecdotes in her novel, Jacob's Room and her anti-war treatise, Three Guineas.

In Search Of Health, Freedom & Identity: An Analysis Of Isabella Bird's And Margaret Fountaine's Renovation Of Self Through Travel & Travel Writing, Mikki L. Stacey

Student Publications

“An Analysis of Isabella Bird’s and Margaret Fountaine’s Renovation of Self through Travel & Travel Writing” tracks three interdependent facets of identity that become apparent in the travel literature of Victorian ladies Isabella Lucy Bird and Margaret Fountaine. These facets are:

• the socialized self (the identity developed as a result of the society in which one grows up)
• the renovated self (the identity developed through interacting with and adapting to other cultures )
• and the edited self (the identity one creates when she writes about her experiences—for my thesis specifically, the identity the author creates to reconcile her socialized and …

Between Life And Literature: The Influence Of Don Quixote And Madame Bovary On Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction, Victoria Tomasulo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project demonstrates the influence of two foundational novels in the Western canon, Don Quixote and Madame Bovary, on twentieth-century British, Italian, and Anglo-American women’s fiction. Both novels illustrate the dangers and pleasures of literary influence. Stylistically innovative, they anticipated concerns that were of import to feminist literary critics in the seventies and beyond: the transformative power of the reading encounter, its normative and subversive effects on gendered identities, and the need of individual writers to liberate themselves from the shackles of literary convention. Drawing upon textual and paratextual evidence such as interviews, journal entries, and essays, I argue …

British Women Writers Conference Call For Papers

Honorable Mention

For its 25th annual meeting, the British Women Writers Conference invites papers and panel proposals considering the theme of “Generations.

Animals In Irish Literature And Culture Edited By Kathryn Kirkpatrick And Borbála Faragó, Geneviève Pigeon

The Goose

Review of Kathryn Kirkpatrick and Borbála Faragó's Animals in Irish Literature and Culture.

Exposing The “Shadow Side”: Female-Female Competition In Jane Austen’S Emma, Melissa M. Lyman

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Many critics have examined the shifting nature of female friendship in Jane Austen’s Emma from cultural and historical angles. However, a comprehensive scientific analysis of female-female alliance and competition in the novel remains incomplete. The Literary Darwinist approach considers the motivations of fictional characters from an evolutionary perspective, focusing primarily on human cognition and behaviors linked to reproductive success, social control, and survival. While overt physical displays of male competition are conspicuous in the actions of the human species and those of their closest primate relatives, female aggression is often brandished psychologically and indirectly, which makes for a much more …

Playing With Matches: Matchmaking As Authorship In The Nineteenth-Century Marriage Plot, Colleen Cusick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the narrative treatment of matchmakers in British marriage plots across the nineteenth century. In an era of increasing state control over marriage and the rising ideology of romantic marriage, the matchmaker represents the communal courtship practices of the past. As such, she offers both a threat to the emerging status quo and a reminder of the persistence of superseded cultural forms in the modern marriage system. Simultaneously, she constitutes an image of female creativity and authority that speaks to concerns about the professionalization of novel-writing and the place of women writers within that profession. Through this focus …

Heavy Expectations: Reading Pregnancy In The Victorian Novel, Livia Arndal Woods

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation articulates the tendency of Victorian novels to make legible only the pregnant bodies of immodest characters who transgress gendered ideologies while the pregnant bodies of modest characters tend to go undescribed. Tracing the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth over the course of the long nineteenth century, my chapters demonstrate the function of moralizing narrative conventions in the representation of pregnancy in mid-Victorian novels, of a self-conscious use of free indirect diagnosis in high-Victorian fiction, and a shift at the fin-de-siècle from pregnancy as a signifier of morality to a symptom of unstable minds. The novels I read closely …

Diagnoses By Gender: The Consequences Of Treatment Of The Mentally Ill In Virginia Woolf's The Waves And Mrs. Dalloway 2016, Erika Nichole Jackson

Master's Theses

“Insanity is purely a disease of the brain…The physician is now the responsible guardian of the lunatic, and must ever remain so.” Sir John Charles Bucknill (1897)

Mental illness has consistently been and continues to be a subject that is viewed as taboo by society, especially when it comes to diagnosing a patient. Instead of acknowledging a person’s actions, thoughts, and words, society continually disregards mental illness as something that is negative and to be feared. The fact that this area of medicine can be difficult and distressing makes it all the more important to continue research. It is true …

“Deliberate Voluptuousness”: The Monstrous Women Of Dracula And Carmilla, Judith Bell

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Vampire women play a culturally significant role in films and literature by revealing the extent to which deviation from Socially accepted behavior is tolerated. In this thesis, I compare the vampire women of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla to their depictions in recent adaptations. In Stoker’s Dracula, the vampire sisters are representative of the shortcomings of 19th century gender roles, especially in regard to women’s communities. In recent adaptations, the vampire sisters’ revealing clothing, promiscuity, and lack of characterization are still closely connected with villainy, and as in Stoker’s novel, the women’s violent deaths in the …

A Band Of Sisters: Female Detectives, Authority, And Fiction From 1864 To The 1930s, Amanda Renee Schafer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Because mystery and detective fiction have been classified as “popular” genres, the complex ideas and ideologies that the authors work with and within reach a wide and varied audience through formulaic and familiar ways. The perceived conservatism of the genre allows authors to present and pursue distinctly anti-conservative views in disguise. For fictional detectives and, especially female detectives, disguise is an effective tool for solving their cases. Often, these detectives will disguise themselves as someone infinitely more conservative than they are in order to gain access to their quarry. Similarly, mystery and detective fiction wear a cloak of conservatism to …

Dandy As Disease: Gender Hygiene And British Nineteenth-Century Literature, Sharon Louise Fox

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

“Dandy as Disease: Gender Hygiene and British Nineteenth-century Literature” explores the link between the nineteenth-century dandy, ideas of hegemonic masculinity, and Walter Besant’s The Revolt of Man, a dystopian text in which women have usurped all traditionally-masculine roles, while men are the caretakers and manual workers. The first chapter deals with the historical role of the dandy in the nineteenth-century and how he might be viewed as the cause of the fall of Britain. The second chapter revolves around Besant’s novel, exploring how men are shown to be at fault for Britain’s fall in the eyes of the rest of …