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Chairman's Annual Report 2011, Jphn Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It was a good year for the Fellowship. Our membership numbers held their own, and although some older members have difficulty getting to events, we have attracted new members who have been enthusiastic in their support.

The theme for the year was Silas Mamer, which celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2011. The first event of the year was the AGM, which we had hoped to expand with a keynote lecture to start the year by Barbara Hardy. Unfortunately, Barbara had to cancel due to ill-health but undaunted, we arranged a review of the previous year and had useful discussions about …

From George Eliot To Her 'Rabbi': An Epistolary Find, Peter A. Brier

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I cannot be easy without writing a word or two this morning for I am conscious that I made myself more disagreeable than nature obliges me to be by my hard quips to you. They were not warrantable by anything but a strong personal and impersonal interest in that sensitive being of yours, which holds what may be very precious things in its keeping. And even with that warrant it will be a proof of your fondness if you quite forgive me.

You look wretched - and I have now so much of that subtle misery which can be explained …

'There Is No Such Thing As Natural Barrenness In Natural Women': Childless Marriages In Silas Marner And The Lifted Veil., Marianne Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

'There is no such thing as natural barrenness in natural women' wrote the eminent French psychologist Eugene Becklard in the 1840s, and, in general, physicians agreed with him. Certainly in mid-nineteenth-century literature children were the sine qua non of a successful marriage; courtship novels rarely ended at the altar, happy endings demanded babies. Unlike lady novelists who wrote silly novels, George Eliot thought marriage, with its complications, compromises, and lack of easy exits, was quite as interesting as courtship, and childless marriages were generally more interesting than generative ones. The two childless marriages' in Silas Mamer and The Lifted Veil …

'The Generations Of Ant And Beavers': Classical Economics And Animals In The Mill On The Floss, Andrew Lallier

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Before any named characters find their way into The Mill on the Floss, the narrator introduces us to two sets of animals (aside from a human driver): white ducks dipping their heads into the stream and horses pulling a covered wagon. The ducks are characterized as being 'unmindful of the awkward appearance they make in the drier world above' (24). This characterization serves a comic purpose, indicating a disparity between the mentality of the unreflective animals and the implicit judgement of the narrator's gaze. By contrast, the horses seem to possess a surprisingly developed interiority (however conditioned by the narrator's …

Models Of Authorship: Margaret Oliphant And George Eliot, Joanne Shattock

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This article is about the profession of authorship in the nineteenth century. More specifically it is about the writing lives of two women novelists. Margaret Oliphant's (1828-1897) work is unfamiliar to most modem readers, apart from her Autobiography, one or two of her supernatural tales, and possibly the 'Chronicles of Carlingford', the series for which she was best known, novels and stories set in an English provincial town where life revolves around church and chapel. George Eliot (1819-1880) on the other hand, needs no introduction to today's readers.

In one of her many reviews of the works of her contemporaries, …

Review Of Women And Personal Property In The Victorian Novel, Deborah Wynne

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Dorothea Brooke was reluctant to accept the bequest of her mother's jewellery, but was George Eliot equally resistant to the allure of pretty things? Deborah Wynne thinks not. Wynne cites a letter from Eliot to her friend Elma Stuart in which the energizing pleasure of 'little joys' is a cause for celebration:

it is cheering to think that there are blue clocks as well as troubles in the world. There is another spiritual daughter of mine whom I should gladly see eager about some small delight - a china monster or a silver clasp - instead of telling me that …

Japanese Branch Report - 2011, Mizue Aida

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On Saturday 3 December 2011, the Fifteenth Annual Convention of the George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at Ferris University.

The morning session began with an opening address by Hidetada Mukai (Ferris University). Three papers were presented in the morning: the first two were introduced and commented upon by Hiroshi Ikezono (Yamaguchi University) and the third by Mie Abe (Shoin University).

The first paper 'Sensitivity and Materiality in "The Lifted Veil'" was presented by Mari Takumi (Tokyo University). She focused on Latimer and his supernatural ability to look into the minds of others and see the reality through his …

Review Of George Eliot, European Novelist, John Rignall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On the opening page of this series of connected essays, John Rignall points out that 'George Eliot's readers and reviewers took it for granted that her novels belonged to a European tradition of fiction'. When Leavis conscripted her into his new canon after the Second World War, this dimension of her work was largely erased and has only recently begun to re-emerge thanks to the work of Rosemary Ashton, Elinor Shaffer and others - not least John Rignall himself. One reason for this neglect was no doubt intrinsic to the work: Rignall concedes that George Eliot's fictions are set overwhelmingly …

Mediums Change, Fears Stay The Same, Lucy Wilhelms

Honors Theses

Although generally dismissed by scholars as being overly sentimental or superstitious, the gothic genre has survived for over four centuries and maintained significant cultural appeal, outlasting the sentimental novel and the travelogue as popular literature. What, then, makes this genre different? What is so special about the gothic?

In my thesis, I examine the evolving cultural appeal of the gothic genre that keeps it attractive and relevant for readers by tracing the gothic text, The Woman in Black by Susan Hill, through its initial inception and its subsequent adaptations. As a novel, The Woman in Black both repeats and revises …

Aemilia Lanyer's Use Of The Garden In Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, Anna Brovold

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Aemilia Lanyer used her collection of poetry, Salve Deus Rex Judæorum to redefine the way that women should look at themselves in the eyes of God. She began her collection with poems dedicated to women that she had deemed virtuous and worthy of individual attention. Her dedicatees were then presented to her readers as the true Disciples of Christ; an honor due to women because of their empathy for Christ's situation. Lanyer rewrote the biblical Passion story in order to include a feminized version of Christ, the rightful female Disciples of Christ and an additional trial presented to Pontius Pilate …

Literary Annual, Katherine D. Harris

Faculty Publications, English and Comparative Literature

No abstract provided.

Charlotte Brontë'S Villette And Sigmund Freud's Dora: An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria: Lucy Snowe's Narrative Ambiguity As Dora's Self-Analysis, Sarah Madeline Brokaw

Honors Scholar Theses

Critics of Charlotte Brontë’s “Villette” note that Lucy Snowe, the mysterious and provocative narrator, fulfills two initiatives: providing interpretation through her obsessive observant analysis of other characters, and provoking the reader’s interpretation in the reader by her deliberate omission of any information pertaining to her past and unexplained lapses in intelligence and sanity. “Villette” is often associated Sigmund Freud’s “Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” because of the similarity between the two young, likely traumatized, female protagonists and the possibility of mapping characters from one narrative onto the other. However, the complex interaction between the two texts allows …

Fulfillment Of Woman And Poet In Elizabeth Barrett Brown's Aurora Leigh, Beth Leonardo

English Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Perpetual Creation And Provocation Of The Self, Krista Damico

Senior Honors Projects

The Perpetual Creation and Provocation of the Self

Krista D’Amico

Faculty Sponsor: Stephen Barber, English

This project consists of four related parts. The first part is a critical and creative work of prose in which I converse with the thought of two philosophers, namely Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze. This conversation enables me to present my own thought and subjectivity in relationship to a very important aspect of my life: music-making. The second part of my project is a critical essay in which I contemplate the work of another artist, Virginia Woolf, and the way that her credo Three Guineas (1938) …

Woman Or Warrior? How Believable Femininity Shapes Warrior Women, Jessica D. Mccall

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My dissertation is an exploration of how femininity is constructed in the characters of warrior women. I define and apply my theory of believable femininity: the notion that in order for characters gendered female to be accepted by an audience, specific textual markers must render them submissive to a dominating male figure. I examine the following warrior women at length: Britomart and Radigund from Spenser's The Faerie Queene; Christine de Pizan's treatment of Amazons in her Book of the City of Ladies and Hippolyta's specific portrayal by de Pizan in comparison to Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, and the …

"'Ic Paet Secgan Maeg, Hwaet Ic Yrmpa Gebad'": Christian Scribes' Condemnation Of Blood Feud And Its Effect On Women In Anglo-Saxon Society, Tara Seate-Beck

Theses & Honors Papers

In preserving The Wife 's Lament, Wulf and Eadwacer, and Beowulf's battle scene with Grendel's mother, Christian poets and scribes preserved much more than just the literature of Anglo-Saxon England. They recorded the feminine voice, a rare perspective emerging from a society founded principally on the fundamentals of warfare and male dominance. The women's songs stand as testaments to the strife and discord women suffered as a consequence of their husbands' participation in blood feud. Their stories are not merely recounted as third person narratives, as much of the other extant texts from the period are; in the elegies, these …

Piracy, Slavery, And Assimilation: Women In Early Modern Captivity Literature, David C. Moberly

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines a hitherto neglected body of works featuring female characters enslaved in Islamicate lands. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many Englishmen and women were taken captive by pirates and enslaved in what is now the Middle East and North Africa. Several writers of the time created narratives and dramas about the experiences of such captives. Recent scholarship has brought to light many of these works and pointed out their importance in establishing what was still a young, unsure, and developing English identity in this early period. Most of this scholarship, however, has dealt with narratives of the …

Technoromanticism: Creating Digital Editions In An Undergraduate Classroom, Katherine D. Harris

Faculty Publications, English and Comparative Literature

No abstract provided.

Film Review: Gulliver's Travels, Karen Gevirtz

Department of English Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Victorian Biography

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

No abstract provided.

Review Of Daniel Deronda, Alain Jumeau

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Alain Jumeau's new French translation! of Daniel Deronda is the first since Ernest David's in 1881,1882 and 1886, no longer easily accessible. Jumeau is an excellent George Eliot scholar as well as an experienced translator - his translations include The Mill on the Floss and The Way We Live Now - and he has produced a graceful and fluent translation with preface and notes, introducing the great Victorian novel, so radically experimental in psychology and narrative form, to a new Francophone readership."

Whether Jumeau is aware of translation theory or not, his version exemplifies the chief processes of translation technically …

Review Of George Eliot's Grammar Of Being, Melissa Anne Raines

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Readers of The George Eliot Review will be familiar with the work of Melissa Anne Raines, which began with the publication of her prize-winning essay for the George Eliot Fellowship, and was followed by several articles, two in this journal, now part of this important book. It had its origin in words from Felix Bolt: 'vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of human existence', said to be 'a precursor to the famous lines ... from Middlemarch ... "the roar that lies on the other side of silence'“, and the first statement of what …

Narration In Middlemarch Revisited, K.M. Newton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In a previously published article entitled 'The Role of the Narrator in George Eliot's Novels',1 I attempted to defend her narrator (particularly in regard to Middlemarch) from a variety of critical attacks. The main points of my argument were: (I) that the narrator should not be identified with Eliot herself as it often is but is a persona with a tone of voice separate from the author and thus both integrated into the fiction and central to its structure; (2) form and realism were reconciled by the fact that the narrator was represented as a historical novelist writing a novel …

The George Eliot Review- Journal Of The George Eliot Fellowship 2011: No. 42, Beryl Gray, John Rignall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

CONTENTS

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

ARTICLES Sarah Bunney: Mr and Mrs Cross with the Artist John Wharlton Bunney in Venice, June 1880 (Prize Essay)................................................................ 7

K. M. Newton: Narration in Middlemarch Revisited...................................................... .19

Rosemary Ashton: The Mill on the Floss and the Difficulties of Relationships (Thirty-Ninth George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 2 October 2010)....................................................26

Marilyn Orr: 'Even our failures are a prophecy': The Mill on the Floss and the 1860s.................................... 38

Kathryn Hughes: Enter the Aunts.............................................................49

Alain Jumeau: Translating The Mill on the Floss into French.................................................. 63

Catherine Brown: The Mill on the Floss on the BBC in 1978........................................... 70 …

Review Of Imagining Italy: Victorian Writers And Travellers, Catherine Waters, Michael Hollington, John Jordan

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Two of the essays in this volume take George Eliot's Romola as their subject. Both reward attention, and they may be in danger of escaping deserved notice given the major concentration here on the life and writing of Dickens. This is the second of three publications projected by the organizers of a conference on 'Dickens, Victorian Culture, Italy', held in Genoa in 2007. The advance poster for the conference, still on the web, inadvertently does the book a slight disservice: 'At present', the organizers write, 'we are considering any or all of 1) A volume of the very best papers …

Japanese Branch Report- 2010, Naomi Ohno

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On Saturday 4 December 2010, the Fourteenth Annual Convention of the George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at Okayama University.

The morning session began with an opening remark by Hiroshi Oshima (Hyogo University of Teacher Education), followed by a Welcome Address by Shintetsu Fukunaga (Okayama University). In the morning, we had three papers presented. The first two papers were introduced and commented upon by Shota Nakajima (Tokushima Bunri University), and the third by Mizue Aida (Nihon University).

The first paper was 'The Seductive Power of Eyes - Re-examining Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss' by Eri Yoshimura …

Translating The Mill On The Floss Into French, Alain Jumeau

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Before dealing with my personal experience of translating The Mill on the Floss into French, I shall start with a few remarks on George Eliot's literary status in France compared with that in English-speaking countries. In Britain, in the States and other English-speaking countries, George Eliot is usually regarded as a great novelist, of the same magnitude as Dickens perhaps, although her novels are definitely more 'high-brow'. It might even be argued that she is the greatest female English novelist. In France, her reputation is quite different and it is possible to find educated people who have never read her …

Review Of The Cambridge Companion To English Literature, Joanne Shattock

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This anthology, edited by Joanne Shattock, with an introduction and contribution by her, contains a rich variety of essays by scholars from British, American and Canadian universities. It begins its survey of Victorian culture in the seven years before Queen Victoria came to the throne, because that allows for discussions on the influence of Romanticism, and ends with 1914, because, in the two decades or so before the outbreak of the Great War, it is argued, Victorianism overlapped Modernism, at least in some parts of the English speaking world. Along the way, the Companion considers the enormous range of texts …

Conference Report- The Mills On The Floss, Juliette Atkinson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

'The Mill on the Floss is everyone's favourite novel' was the provocative declaration that launched the conference, devoted to Eliot's second novel, held at the Institute of English Studies on 6 November 2010. Barbara Hardy's opening statement was given some weight by the day's papers which, in tackling subjects as diverse as translation, inheritance, idleness, and adaptation, repeatedly expressed the speakers' highly personal relationship with the novel.

In the first of two hour-long papers, entitled 'Inheritance and parental investment in The Mill on the Floss' , David Amigoni (Exeter) offered fresh insights into the intersection of aesthetic and scientific concerns …

Review Of The Mill On The Floss On The Bbc In 1978, Catherine Brown

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The 2010 London conference on The Mill on the Floss was designedly conscious of its distance in time from its subject - this distance being measurable by a round number. It was as important to keep in mind, however, the distance between the novel's composition and its setting. As it happens, this was the same as that between the conference and the 1978 BBC TV adaptation of the novel on which this paper reflects. For Eliot, the temporal setting corresponded to her childhood, as it would have done for some of her readers, and as will also be true of …