Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Notes On Contributors 2008

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Kathleen Adams was Secretary of the Fellowship from 1968 until her retirement in the spring of this year. 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.

Juliette Atkinson is a teaching assistant at University College London, where she recently completed her PhD thesis on Victorian Biography and the Representation of 'Obscure' Lives, which is partly concerned with the manner in which Thomas Carlyle and George Eliot influenced nineteenth-century life-writing.

Michael …

Reflections On Scence Revisited: A Festival Celebrating The 150th Anniversary Of Scenes Of Clerical Life, John Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Members might be interested to read some reflections, several months on, of the Fellowship's involvement in the Nuneaton-based Scenes Revisited Festival which took place mostly during September 2007. One reason for this overview is that the Fellowship spent some £10,000 of its funds on the events throughout the year; another reason is that our involvement in a partnership helped to secure £50,000 from Heritage Lottery Fund to pay for a Project Officer and the many free events he was to coordinate.

There had been talk for two years among the group of history/museum/arts enthusiasts in Nuneaton and Bedworth, both local …

Review Of Felix Holt, The Radical, Michael Eaton, Lucy Bailey

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Felix Holt, with its large cast of characters, and above all with its notoriously complicated legal plot, presents a real challenge when adapting and reducing it for a three hour, serialized radio dramatization. Michael Eaton is to be congratulated on neatly simplifying the plot, by omitting Thomas Trounsem's sale of his rights to Durfey and the exchange of names between Bycliffe and Scaddon. Admittedly this left a few loose ends, and listeners might have been puzzled by the name Scaddon, mentioned without explanation, but on the whole the necessary simplification was skillfully done and the main plot threads made clear. …

Review Of George Eliot, Jan Jedrzejewski

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The physical format of this important overview is unattractive, the print small, with some forty-eight lines to the page giving the impression of over packing to keep the cost down. This companion to George Eliot studies - it is in fact more than a guide - has a number of blemishes. Jedrzejewski has not been well served by his editor(s): he has been allowed some loosely inappropriate phrasing on occasions, as with Mary Ann's reaction to her father's death which 'made his departure obviously painful for her in emotional terms' (9). This hardly conveys the anguished outcry or poignant self-searchings …

Review Of Jeanie, An 'Army Of One': Mrs Nassau Senior, 1828-1877, The First Woman In Whitehall, Sybil Oldfield

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Sybil Oldfield is well-known for her work on humanitarian women, creative philanthropists and pacifists, and her new book is an important contribution to Victorian studies, a life-story told with admiration, sympathy and style, as cram-full of character and emotion as a novel, and of great interest to George Eliot scholars.

The neglect of Jeanie Senior, called Jeanie, pronounced Janie - her enthusiastic biographer puts 'sic' after deviations, eccentrically rather than pedantically since Jeanie was christened Jane Elizabeth and named Jane on her tomb and even in this book's index - is at first sight puzzling, because her ideals and zeal …

'Acting Out' In Daniel Deronda, Toni Griffiths

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This short paper illustrates the way in which psychoanalytic perspectives can help us to understand the effect which a complex literary text like Daniel Deronda has on the reader. The two psychoanalytic perspectives used are Freud's insights into the way dreams work, and Melanie Klein's exploration of the nature and importance of the unconscious phantasies of very early childhood and her discovery of the early developmental 'positions'. 1 These insights help to explain how what may appear puzzling and difficult in a novel nevertheless holds and moves its readers.

Freud's insights into the meaning and form of dreams2 suggest that …

Address At Celebration For Kathleen And Bill Adams, Jonathan Ouvry

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I'm ashamed to say that I didn't know of the existence of the George Eliot Fellowship until 1980, which was of course the great year of the stone-laying in Westminster Abbey. I can't remember how it came to be known that one of George Henry Lewes's great-great-grandsons just happened, conveniently, to have an office next door to the Abbey, but then I suppose that that is one of the many secrets of Kathleen's success in her role as Secretary of the Fellowship - she was very good at finding out useful connections and unlikely information in the highways and byways …

Address At Wreath-Laying In The George Eliot Memorial Garden, Nuneaton 17 June 2007, Don Jones

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

As I reflected on 'famous sons and daughters of Nuneaton', I came up with a short list. George EliotlMary Anne Evans, Larry Grayson, Ken Loach.

George Eliot must have cut quite an unconventional figure in her day. Larry Grayson, that rather gentle comedian, was also quite an unconventional character. Then Ken Loach, perhaps not so controversial in his personal life, none the less often espousing unconventional causes through his films. Is it something about Nuneaton that those it throws up into the arms of fame should have something of the unconventional about them? - or at least an eye for …

Annual Report 2007, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This has not been the easiest report to write, possibly being my last one. My first report forty years ago was so short - a mere half page - but, in those days the tiny Fellowship was doing very little so it was not difficult to write it. Little did I know I would still be doing it forty years later and with an extremely busy Fellowship involved.

Our year began, as always, with the Annual General Meeting. Susan Healey succeeded Bill Adams as Vice Chairman and Bill took her place on the Council for one year. After the business …

Daniel Deronda: The Cultural Imperative Of Religion, Annemarie Frank

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot's last novel Daniel Deronda differs strikingly from her earlier works in the presentation of its protagonists and her innovative use of the literary genres of realism and romanticism. In her earlier novels Eliot had espoused an idea of humanism that transcended social class by fictionalizing the small but significant contributions ordinary men and women make towards England's social and cultural progress. Eliot had created realistic heroes with human frailties on the principle that 'human deeds are made up of the most subtly intermixed good and evil'.1 Furthermore, she had attacked the ideal hero type, who was the favourite …

Editor's Notes

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Middlemarch has been in the public eye since our last issue: Erica Wagner's column in the Times for Saturday 13 October 2007 bore the heading 'How good is Middlemarch if you reread it? Better'; and on 24 May 2008 the Review section of the Saturday Guardian devoted two and- a half broadsheet pages to Zadie Smith's tribute to George Eliot, 'On Middlemarch'. We have recently received Josie Billington's new Reader's Guide to the novel, Eliot's 'Middlemarch' (Continuum, 2008). This will be reviewed in our next issue.

Another work just received - Elizabeth Sabiston's Private Sphere to World Stage from Austen …

The Thirty-Sixth George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 2007: Scenes And After, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The Folio Society's cosmetic edition of George Eliot's fiction, which was published in 1999, has no place on any spine of its seven-volume set for Scenes of Clerical Life. A search of the actual texts, however, reveals George Eliot's first published fiction bedded together with Silas Marner, the pair sharing a neat introduction by Jill Paton-Walsh. I pondered at the time if spine exclusion meant that Scenes was just too minor for remark, or whether, as is the way with publishers, getting things wrong can be ignored once the books are on the shelves or, as with the Folio edition, …

George Eliot's Poetry Of The Soul, Gregory Tate

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The poetic epigraph to Daniel Deranda, written by George Eliot herself, anticipates and encapsulates the novel's interest in the complex processes that make up human psychology:

Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul: There, 'mid the throngs of hurrying desires That trample on the dead to seize their spoil, Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible As exhalations laden with slow death, And o’r the fairest troop of captured joys Breathes pallid pestilence.

The epigraph describes psychological phenomena that will feature prominently throughout Daniel Deranda: the multiple and contradictory elements of individual character; the often self-defeating nature of human thought and …

Prophets, Priests, And Kings: John Milton And The Reformation Of Rights And Liberties In England, John Witte Jr.

Faculty Articles

In this Article, I focus on the development of rights talk in the pre-Enlightenment Protestant tradition. More particularly, I show how early modem Calvinists-those Protestants inspired by the teachings of Genevan reformer John Calvin (1509-1564)-developed a theory of fundamental rights as part and product of a broader constitutional theory of resistance and military revolt against tyranny. With unlimited space, I would document how various Calvinist groups from 1550 to 1700 helped to define and defend each and every one of the rights that would later appear in the American Bill of Rights and how these Calvinists condoned armed revolution to …

Forging Literary History: Historical Fiction And Literary Forgery In Eighteenth-Century Britain, Anne H. Stevens

English Faculty Research

In this essay, I wish to explore a similar dialectic of historical positivism and skepticism in eighteenth-century Britain. Over the course of the century, but particularly in the second half, new and more scientific standards of historical investigation developed, with practitioners expressing a greater confidence about their ability to know the past. During these years, a series of monumental achievements in historiography appeared: David Hume’s History of England (1754–62), Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), and William Robertson’s History of Scotland (1759), to name just three of the most celebrated. As part of this increased interest …

Mis-Education And The Crisis In Male Subjectivity: William Godwin’S Middle Novels, 1799–1817, Lisa-Marie Lynn Butler

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

In the tumultuous period of the 1790s, the English anarchist philosopher William Godwin was a seminal figure whose 1793 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness stood as a touchstone for the reform movement in Britain. Godwin is primarily known today as the author of Political Justice and Things As They Are; Or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, a 1794 novel which many readers, past and present, have regarded as a fictionalized allegory of the philosophical claims outlined in Political Justice.

Although his fame as a novelist largely rests on this one popular novel, …

Dressing The Girl/Playing The Boy: Twelfth Night Learns Soccer On The Set Of She's The Man, L Monique Pittman

Faculty Publications

She’s The Man (2006), Andy Fickman’s adaptation of Twelfth Night, pulses with the Title Nine girl power that found cinematic voice and financial reward in Bend It Like Beckham (2002). Creating a pretext for the play’s gender swapping by entering the world of high school soccer, She’s the Man exploits conventions associated with the teen film genre–social group conformity and anxiety, crisis of identity, divorced parents, and ineffectual authority figures. Shakespeare’s cross-dressed heroine Viola becomes Viola Hastings played by Amanda Bynes, for whom this film serves as a star-vehicle showcasing Bynes’s comedic range. In some ways, the film intensifies the …

Front Matter, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

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

No abstract provided.

Contents, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

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

No abstract provided.

A Place For Originality Within Intertextuality: The Texts And Intertexts Of Dorothy Gale And The Wizard Of Oz, Savannah Ganster

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

No abstract provided.

“Suit Me All Points Like A Man”: Gender And Performance In As You Like It And Richard Iii, Taylor Burns

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

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

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

No abstract provided.

The Oswald Review Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 10 Fall 2008

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

No abstract provided.

Catalyst And Inhibitor: The Song Of Keats’S Nightingale, Jonathan Krol

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

No abstract provided.