Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Review Of Faithful Realism: Elizabeth Gaskell And Leo Tolstoy A Comparative Study, Josie Billington

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Who is the English novelist worthy of comparison with Tolstoy? The name of George Eliot immediately suggests itself, though even Middlemarch does not have the range of War and Peace. What Henry James said of Eliot - that she is 'also a good deal of a philosopher and it is to this union of the keenest observation with the ripest reflection that her style owes its essential force' - seems to apply to Tolstoy as well. F. R. Leavis, we recall, invoked the name of the Russian novelist in his appraisal of Eliot, arguing that the best parts of …

Review Of George Eliot, Music And Victorian Culture, Delia Da Sousa Correa

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Delia da Sousa Correa takes as starting point 'the yearning for spiritual expansion and sympathetic experience' so evident in George Eliot; and music, an 'undersong' to the desires of transcendence and affinity, is the prime concern in da Sousa Correa's exploration of its transformations in Eliot's fiction. To do this, da Sousa Correa explores a range of intellectual and cultural contexts for Eliot's work, though not all those her title's inclusive 'Victorian culture' might suggest. Da Sousa Correa acknowledges Beryl Gray's George Eliot and Music (1989) and rightly claims her approach differs fundamentally, the two studies being complementary. Da Sousa …

Annual Report 2002, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

2002 was, as always, a busy year, and the one in which we published our Pitkin Guide to George Eliot. This was something of a milestone for us as Pitkin Guides are so well known around the UK and it seemed right that George Eliot should be included in the vast number of Pitkin titles.

We held our Annual General Meeting on 15 March and re-elected, with great pleasure, our President, Jonathan Ouvry, for another three-year term. Jonathan is so supportive of everything we do. We had been again without a treasurer until Jill Bridgewater agreed to replace Sophie Pavier …

Review Of George Eliot A Bibliographical History, William Baker, John C. Ross

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This enormously impressive history is the fruit of something like thirty-five years of work by William Baker and John Ross. They have brought together a huge and comprehensive body of bibliographical information, broken down into five main sections and two appenctixes. There are extensive entries and notes on the major works; minor literary works (novellas and poetry); essays and reviews; miscellaneous writing (unpublished works in publishable genres, compilations of short extracts, partly authored writings, unpublished autobiographical writings); collections and collected works (more poetry, essays, novels and complete works); and 'Eliotiana' (sequels, settings for songs from The Spanish Gypsy, collections of …

Review Of George Eliot And Schiller: Intertextuality And Cross-Culural Discourse, Dutch Readings Of George Eliot, Deborah Guth, Deiderik L. Van Werven

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In their very different ways these two studies contribute significantly to our understanding of George Eliot's place in the wider context of European literary culture. Diederik van Werven examines the nineteenth-century reception of her novels in the Netherlands, thus filling in what is, for most of the English-speaking world, a blank space in the map of her contemporary reputation; while Deborah Guth reads her work through the lens provided by the well-known but relatively neglected Schiller, who was the fust German writer to arouse her enthusiasm, but who was later supplanted, both in her own life and in subsequent critical …

Commemorative Occasions In 2002, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The George Eliot Memorial Garden in Nuneaton reached its half century in May 2002. In 1930 several literary men, amongst them George Bernard Shaw, were asked if Nuneaton should erect a memorial to George Eliot. Most of them expressed astonishment that one was not already in existence. They may have been even more amazed to discover that it would be another twenty-two years before one appeared, for it was not until 1952 that the George Eliot Memorial Garden was established.

The Newdegate family at Arbury Hall was one step ahead of Nuneaton as an obelisk had already been erected by …

The Thirty-First George Eliot Memorial Lecture; Jane Austen And George Eliot: Afterlives And Letters, Joanne Shattock

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

'A woman and her book are identical' - or so the American writer Edgar Allen Poe reflected when reading an early collection of poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.' Remembering the autobiographical nature of much of Barrett Browning's early work, his comment is not surprising. But it has a more general relevance for nineteenth-century women writers. The charge that they could only write of what they knew, and that what they knew best was themselves, was made regularly by reviewers. The easy association of the life and the work, or more accurately, a refusal to separate them, was crucial to the …

Address At Wreath-Laying In The George Eliot Memorial Garden, Nuneaton 30 June 2002, Jonathan G. Ouvry

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I thought that I would talk today about a previously unexplored topic - George Eliot and cats. Unfortunately, I find that the reason why the topic is previously unexplored is that George Eliot, unlike the other Eliot, had very little, or possibly nothing, to say about cats. There may have been the odd un-named farm cat lurking about in Adam Bede, but nothing on which one could construct a ten-minute talk in the open air.

Dogs, of course, are quite another story, both real and fictional. There was Pug, a present from John Blackwood, sadly lost after only eighteen months, …

George Eliot: Elegies And Eulogies, Margaret Harris

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The death of George Eliot on 22 December 1880 occasioned many prose obituaries and also a number of verse tributes.' I have located eleven of these in all, along with a twelfth poem published in her lifetime: nine poets are represented, of whom four are women and five men (assuming J. S. Dawson and 'K. G.' to be male). Together, the poems provide a sidelight on her reputation. Elegy frequently mourns dead poets and establishes poetic genealogies: while George Eliot's fame depends on her fiction rather than her poetry, her eminence in letters as well as her moral and intellectual …

Review Of Middlemarch, Margret Stevens, Annelies Roeleveld

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The recent appearance of a Dutch translation of Middlemarch, in a prestigious series of classics by a leading publishing house, may well be considered as constituting 'cultural justice', and it is justice long overdue. Ever since the mid-nineteenth century, there has been a flourishing market for English literature in the Netherlands, in the original as well as in translation. Of recent years, publishing practice has been carefully to coordinate publication of translations with that of English editions, for once an English novel is available, there is hardly a market for translations. That makes it even more remarkable that there is …

Comic George Eliot, George Scott Christian

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot's famous digression on the nature of literary realism in chapter 17 of Adam Bede has long been understood as a kind of aesthetic manifesto for the Victorian novel. Much has been written on Eliot's insistence that a faithful narrative representation of reality must take account of low and middle life, much as Dutch genre painting seeks to imitate quotidian life in all its prosaic detail. What has attracted virtually no attention in discussions of Eliot's ideas on realism, however, is the central importance of comic theory to her realist aesthetic.' Indeed, Eliot's comic theory deeply informs and shapes …

William Blake: An Integrated Teaching Approach, Shawn C. Gaspaire

All Graduate Projects

The purpose of this project was to explore the usefulness of providing integrated curricula in today's contemporary classroom. The literature review illustrates that integrated approaches to teaching improve classroom engagement rates, retention, and skill level across grade levels when compared to non-integrated environments. A tenweek model using William Blake as a catalyst is presented. The integrated approach using Blake incorporates history, English, the arts, vocational arts, communication, and the technologies. Implications of integrated curriculum and William Blake are discussed.

Formulating Fantasies: Marriage In Victorian England And George Eliot's Middlemarch, Liza Welch Barnes

Theses and Dissertations

One of the oldest states of existence known to humanity, marriage is a traditional state of being, uniting one man and one woman to love, honor, cherish, and protect each other for the rest of their lives. In Victorian England, however, many men and women questioned traditional expectations concerning marriage. Society's norms in Britain dictated that marriage was the ultimate goal in the nineteenth century, and, according to Barbara Weiss, "there has perhaps never been an age (or a literature) as relentlessly pro marriage as the Victorian period" (67).

However, many issues concerning marriage disturbed some freer-thinking Victorians, including novelist …

Sexual Slander And Working Women In "The Roaring Girl", Mario Digangi

Publications and Research

Though scholarship of the early modern era focuses on the character of Moll Frith when considering the gender ideology contained in Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's "The Roaring Girl," the play's other female characters are also of interest. The "citizen wives" of the play are women who, though married, work outside the home. Their special status in the emerging capitalist marketplace of the early modern era gave rise to unique anxieties about their economic power and sexual availability. These anxieties in turn made these women especially susceptible to slander against their sexual reputation and thus respectability in the community. An …

Prophecy And Anti-Popery In Victorian London: John Cumming Reconsidered, Robert Ellison, Carol Herringer

English Faculty Research

John Cumming (1807-1881) was the popular minister of the Crown Court Church of Scotland in London's Covent Garden. This article examines his views on the end times and the Roman Catholic Church, two of the favorite subjects of his preaching.

The Mermaid's Dress: Marriage And Empire In The Voyage Out And Mrs Dalloway, Melissa Wharton-Smith

Masters Theses

This thesis examines how socio-historical influences shape the protagonists of Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915) and Mrs. Dalloway (1925)-- Rachel Vinrace and Clarissa Dalloway. During the writing of these two novels, attitudes about roles for women before and after World War I shifted as pre-war domestic strife was replaced by a post-war push to return to normalcy. Throughout the period, imperialist ideology demanded that women conform to traditional gender roles by marrying and reproducing. Woolf depicts this pressure as it affects her two protagonists.

In The Voyage Out, the British Empire's imposing presence is exhibited through the setting of …

Facade Of A Romantic: Benjamin Disraeli And Coningsby Or The New Generation, Sybil Or The Two Nations, And Tancred Or The New Crusade, Peggy Pope

Masters Theses

Dismissed by contemporary critics as a second-rate writer, Benjamin Disraeli has been undervalued for over a hundred and fifty years. Writing in 1979, D.R. Schwarz rued that no recent full-length study of his novels had been undertaken, while other, even more minor novelists have been regularly exhumed. A substantial reassessment may be underway, as Paul Smith notes, particularly in the area of Disraeli's Jewishness. Bernard Glassman's volume, Benjamin Disraeli: The Fabricated Jew in Myth and Memory (2003), and Disraeli's Jewishness (2002), by Todd Endelman and Tony Kushner, attest to this new interest. A recent general study, Disraeli (2000), by Edgar …

The Oswald Review Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 5 Fall 2003

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.