Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Review Of The Presence Of The Present: Topics Of The Day In The Victorian Novel, Richard D. Altick

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Richard D. Altick, Regents' Professor Emeritus of English at The Ohio State University, is well known for such books as Victorian People and Ideas. His latest work draws from 150 novels to develop connections between people, objects, events, and issues mentioned in fiction and their real life originals in the Victorian period. The generous selection of sources includes not only the best remembered novelists but also such writers as Susan Ferrier, John Galt, Samuel Warren, and Charlotte Yonge. All of Eliot's novels except, of course, Romola, are included.

The material is organized into twenty thematic chapters, ranging from popular entertainments …

Review Of Meriden: Its People And Houses Part 1, Doreen M.K. Agutter

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This publication, said to be 'the first book ever written about Meriden', has come to our attention because of 'The George Eliot Connection' and because it was researched and written by a member of the George Eliot Fellowship. The historical research, dating back to the Middle Ages, is very thorough, and there are numerous photographs, plans and maps. The prose is somewhat breathless, as if copious notes have been written up with great rapidity, and this impairs its clarity. There are some errors in proof: the Clarkes, not the Evanses, must have been living at The Cottage in 1850. The …

Message Of Greeting From The Fellowship President, Jonathan G. Ouvry

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This year I write my annual greeting to the Fellowship between two very special occasions. Last June we celebrated in Westminster Abbey the Tenth Anniversary of the unveiling of the Memorial Stone. The occasion was made particularly memorable by the participation of Dean Edward Carpenter (now retired) who had taken such an active and positive part in the original installation of the stone. As on past occasions he gave a fascinating, scholarly and apparently quite spontaneous gem of a talk, for which we were and are most grateful.

The second special occasion, to which I am looking forward with what …

Technology And Development: Opposition To The Railway In Middlemarch, Paul H. Lorenz

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In Book 6 (chapter 56) of Middlemarch, George Eliot presents a scene in which the citizens of the hamlet of Frick set upon a group of railway surveyors, "the enemies of mankind”, with hayforks. The surveyors escape with their lives only through the intervention of Caleb Garth and Fred Vincy. This incident allows Eliot to discuss the attitudes of the working classes towards the technological developments of the Industrial Revolution and to contrast these attitudes with those of the middle class. While middle class women "regarded travelling by steam as presumptuous and dangerous", the local landowners, who had the vote …

Audio Cassette Review, Ruth Harris, Gabriel Woolf

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Gabriel WooIf' s second cassette of readings from George Eliot begins and ends with her poetry. However we assess the value of her poems, there can be no doubt that they raise issues that were fundamental to her. Nor can there be any doubt that the poetry is illuminated for us by the voice of the reader. His tenderly nostalgic interpretation of the Brother and Sister sequence is enlivened by glints of humour as George Eliot describes her devoted dependence on her "little man / Of forty inches", or reveals her excitement when she catches the' 'silver perch" - her …

Review Of Approaches To Teaching Eliot's 'Midddlemarch', Kathleen Blake

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The editor quotes Gilbert Highet, who wrote 'Bad teaching wastes a great deal of effort, and spoils many lives which might have been full of energy and happiness'. Salutary words indeed, but what about those people who seem to have thought too much about it (Highet suggests that bad teaching results from not thinking enough about it) and too self-consciously at that? This book is a curious mixture of interesting and practical ideas on the one hand and inflated intellectual selfindulgence on the other. Kathleen Blake's introduction summarises the main concerns of the book and its trends. Here is an …

London Branch Report 1990

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The London Branch held a George Eliot Supper Evening at S1. Philip's, Earls Court Road, W.8. in celebration of her 171st birthday on 22nd November. Sunday 18th was chosen, and the whole occasion was finely organised by Michael and Suzanne Forrest. The principle guest was the actor Robin Bailey. Some 50 or so guests were wined, dined and entertained by two young musicians, the pianist Roger Owens and the harpist Susannah Bale. It was good to see the parent organisation represented by Bill and Kathleen Adams.

Review Of George Eliot's Selected Essays, Poems And Other Writings, Graham Handley, A.S. Byatt

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In 1963 Thomas Pinney published his edition of The Essays of George Eliot, a meticulous, scholarly and conservative selection. It was a major contribution to George Eliot studies, coming as it did in the wake of her rediscovery, more properly re-evaluation, through F.R. Leavis, Joan Bennett, Barbara Hardy, W.J. Harvey and others. Gordon Haight had discovered her for himself in the 1930' s, and devoted the rest of his life to editing her letters, writing her biography, encouraging scholars and critics and initiating the Clarendon edition of her works. Pinney is in the immediate Haight tradition, clear, concise, admirably relevant: …

Obituary: Edith Lenton- Vice President Of The George Eliot Fellowship

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Edith Lenton, who has died at the age of 81, was a Vice President of the Fellowship, a former treasurer and a very active and loyal member for nearly thirty years. Born in Nuneaton, the only child of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Starkey, she had an early contact with George Eliot the novelist as she took part as a child in the centenary celebrations in 1919 of Nuneaton's famous daughter. These celebrations were organised by Nuneaton Borough Council and the principal participants were the schoolchildren of the town who gave their performances, consisting of dancing, singing, tableaux vivant and sketches, …

Annual Report, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

An uneventful Annual General Meeting in March began our year and was followed by a much more stimulating AGM of the Alliance of Literary Societies in Birmingham on April 20th, when a party from the Fellowship attended and had the pleasure of meeting members of other literary societies with whom we could exchange ideas. The Alliance President, Gabriel Woolf, addressed the meeting and spoke with feeling about the need to educate our young people in the literature of the past - a sentiment echoed a few days later by the Prince of Wales.

On April 26th we attended the official …

The Twentieth George Eliot Memorial Lecture: George Eliot And Elizabeth Gaskell, Jenny Uglow

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The title suggested for this talk was 'two literary ladies' - they were certainly literary, but at various times their contemporaries would have denied that either of them were ladies. George Eliot was 'the strong minded woman' in Carlyle's words, who ran off with G.H. Lewes. Mrs. Gaskell was the author of Ruth, burned by two members of her husband's Unitarian congregation at Cross Street Chapel, Manchester because its heroine was a fallen woman. And if George Eliot was strong minded, so was Mrs. G. Her stubbornness drove Dickens, for example, to distraction: 'Oh, Mrs. Gaskell, fearful, fearful! If I …

Review Of G.H. Lewes: A Life, Beryl Gray, Rosemary Ashton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

For a very long time, George Henry Lewes's reputation has centred on the fact that, for the last 25 years of his life, he was George Eliot's partner. Not a vast number of people have cared to know very much about him beyond an idea, perhaps, that he was a rather freewheeling journalist who produced a Life of Goethe, and that he was free-thinking and - at least until he took up with George Eliot - somewhat free-living. It is gratifying, therefore, that this highly intelligent, quick and versatile, immensely fair-minded man who loved science as much as he loved …

Review Of George Eliot, Ian Sutton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This is the first of a series which will 'take full account of contemporary literary theory, providing collections of key modern readings of major authors.... Among the critical positions represented are British poststructuralism, deconstruction, feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxism and new historicism'.

Do not despair, however. Things are not quite as bad as they sound. Most of the essays here can be understood with a bit of effort and most of those are worth the effort. They have been carefully chosen not only to include the main schools of criticism but also to cover the whole range of George Eliot's work, and …

Review Of George Eliot's Midlands: Passion In Exile, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Various biographies and critical studies argue that Mary Ann or Marian Evans's formative years in the Midlands influenced George Eliot's art. They do so by explaining that memories of Robert Evans contributed to George Eliot's conceptions of Adam Bede and Caleb Garth, that Cheverel Manor is Arbury Hall, that Amos Barton is largely based on the Rev. John Gwyther, the curate of Chilvers Coton whom Mary Ann knew as a child, that a good deal of autobiographical material went into the creation of Maggie Tulliver, and so on.

Is there a need, then, for Graham Handley's George Eliot's Midlands when …

Review Of George Eliot (Marian Evans): A Literary Life, Kerry Mcsweeney

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Many publishers run series of 'introductions' to English literature - handy roll-calls of the canon, beginning with Chaucer and ending with Virginia Woolf or thereabouts - and inevitably George Eliot has to be there. One is, of course, glad for the small army of academics for whom gainful employment is thus provided, but the question naturally arises whether so many books covering the same ground serve any useful purpose.

In Professor McSweeney's case the answer is yes. His book is rewarding because he is sufficiently master of his subject to make it his own. He forms his own judgements, chooses …

George Eliot And Greek Tragedy, P.E. Easterling

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

A quotation from Romola in S. H. Butcher's essay on Sophoc1es (1891) first led me to George Eliot as a reader of Greek tragedy:

Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our will: nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never; they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness. (Ch. 16)

The intensity of the language used here matches that of the Aeschylean contexts that must have been Eliot's ultimate model;2 it implies a close imaginative contact which can perhaps help to enrich our own reading of …

Virginia Woolf & Postmodernism: Literature In Quest & Question Of Itself, Pamela L. Caughie

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism argues not that Virginia Woolf is a postmodernist but that postmodern assumptions about art can account for her narrative innovations and feminist politics better than conventional modernist and feminist approaches to her works. In rethinking many of the prominent aesthetic and critical positions of her day, Woolf anticipated many postmodernist tenets. This book helps us to understand how and why she came to hold such views, and how we might change our reading of Woolf and narrative literature in turn.

Pamela Caughie brings together pragmatism and postmodern theory to move critical inquiry, particularly feminist criticism and …

Laughter, Game, And Ambiguous Comedy In The South English Legendary, Gregory M. Sadlek

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Pound's Cavalcanti And Craven's Carducci, Robert Spoo

Articles, Chapters in Books and Other Contributions to Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Victorian Ideology And The Discourse Of Gender In Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders And The Return Of The Native, Juliana Payne

Theses : Honours

This analysis will focus on the perceived harmony or disjunction between Hardy's representation of women in his fiction, and the middle class ideologies of gender difference and sexuality during what is referred to as the Victorian period, roughly the 1840s to the 1880s. The parameters of the dominant middle class ideology are established, as certain ideas will be held to be predominant or widely accepted at a given time. The aim of this thesis is to ascertain to what extent Hardy subverts the dominant ideology, and how he is involved in contesting the conventional contemporary representations of women. Part of …

Doubling, Splitting And Fragmentation In Bleak House, Mary Cleopatra Lloyd Da Silva

Theses : Honours

This thesis draws mainly on psychoanalytic theories, and explicates the doubling leitmotiv in Bleak House (1971), which portrays Victorian personality as split and its society as fragmented. This is seen as a suggestion of Dickens' conception of human identity as fragile and vulnerable. Each autonomous character represents a single aspect of personality, so that conflict, when it occurs, is in fact intra-psychic, rather than inter-psychic. The study investigates the problem of the dual or split personality via the quest for identity, and addresses Dickens' perceived need to reward self-effacing characters and punish the assertive. It explores the psychological ramifications of …

Deconstructing Alice's 'Wonderlands': The Non-Sense Of Nonsense?, Beverley Farr

Theses : Honours

The profusion of literary criticism surrounding the Alice books affirms the heterogeneous nature of the texts 'Which resist the imposition of an exclusive, closed interpretation. A deconstructive reading of the texts demonstrates the tendency of the books toward multiple meanings, revealing how they are transgressive of notions of coherence and structure. Utilising some of the concepts of Jacques Lacan to examine the texts beyond the traditional analytic readings, language is shown to be a signifying chain of desire, structured like the unconscious. Alice becomes Lacan's split subject, banished to the world of language where she finds herself enmeshed in an …

Virginia Woolf's Keen Sensitivity To War: It's Roots And It's Impact On Her Novels, Nancy Topping Bazin, Jane Hamovit Lauter

English Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) War InspIred Horror In Virginia Woolf. Her antipathy toward those who cause wars is evident in her two essays, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas. The impact of war on her fiction expands from a portrayal of individuals as victims of war to a vision of war that encompasses the possible annihilation of civilization. Between the Acts, Woolf's final novel, is obviously an artistic response to the threat posed by World War II. However, a close examination of her works reveals, to a surprising degree, her early and persistent preoccupation with the consequences of war, …

An "Avowed Contradiction": Gender And Historical Instability In Clarissa, Jennifer C. Berkshire

Masters Theses

As one of the first novels written, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa serves as an important social text with which to examine the eighteenth century. Most theoretical studies of the emergence of novelistic discourse have interpreted the rise of the new genre as a reflection of other broader socio-economic changes. This study focuses on the role of the novel in bringing about such changes--in articulating particular attitudes, beliefs, and opinions that have come to be associated with the middle class. The study involves an examination of Clarissa, Lovelace, and the Harlowe family as representatives of particular ideologies, or understandings of history, with …