Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Review Of Imagining Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics Of Austen, Eliot And Hardy, Kay Young

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Imagining Minds sets out to read nineteenth-century fiction in the context of modern theories of human cognition and of the mind/body relationship, making the central contention that 'the novel is an aesthetic map to and experience of the nature of the mind-brain' (9; Young's italics). Young takes up concepts from a range of modern psychological theories, especially those of Antonio Damasio, and also makes frequent reference to the revolutionary, and still seminal, work of William James, as a framework within which to investigate how the three major novelists of the title represent the mind's problematic relations with the world as …

Enter The Aunts...., Kathryn Hughes

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

My title is taken from Chapter 7 of 'Book First' of The Mill on the Floss which describes the moment we first meet Aunts Glegg, Pullet and Deane in all their bustling, sharp-tongued, comic glory. The full title of the chapter is 'Enter the Aunts and Uncles' and the three redoubtable Dodson sisters are indeed accompanied by their husbands, the Uncles, as they descend upon Dorlcote Mill for a family summit about their nephew Tom Tulliver's education. Yet while Messrs Glegg, Pullet and Deane subsequently play their individual parts in the unfolding of the novel's plot, it is the Aunts …

A Portrait Of Lucy Deane, Barbara Hardy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The young woman lifted her hands from the keys, and swivelled on her piano-stool to smile at the large bald-headed man comfortable in a crimson armchair.

'Well, sir, was that to your liking?'

'I seem to remember the piece, my dear, but not the composer. Is it something you haven't played for a long time? By one o’ your Germans? You know I never was musical, though I played the flute when I was a young man. Trade opened my eyes and sharpened my wits but I didn't have your expensive schooling.'

'No, papa, not one of my Germans but …

Annual Report 2010, John Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It is pleasing to report another successful year for the Fellowship, albeit with the occasional blip where we were perhaps over-ambitious in our plans: we had to cancel two of our George Eliot Country Tours. We lost a few members, either as a result of age and infirmity or the increase in our subscription rates, but we also gained new ones, and made many new contacts as a result of our activities through the year

I start with thanks to the Fellowship Council, strengthened at the AGM with new members; I am glad to report that our Council meetings are …

Mr. And Mrs. Cross With The Artist John Wharlton Bunney In Venice, June 1880, Sarah Bunney

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The dramatic incident in Venice on the morning of 16 June 1880, when the newly married John Walter Cross jumped into the Grand Canal from his hotel room's balcony, has attracted much curiosity and speculation. Understandably Mrs. Cross (George Eliot) was reticent about the happening in her journal and letters, and also wrote little about her stay in Venice before and after the event. But there is another source of information about the couple's Venetian experiences - the personal recollections and correspondence of the English artist John Wharlton Bunney (1828-82).

Bunney, described by Marian as 'an excellent painter and an …

'Pier Glass Imagery' In George Eliot's Middlemarch And Its Fictional Treatment Of Spinoza's Ethics, Tapan Kumar Mukherjee

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In 'George Eliot's Middlemarch as a translation of Spinoza's Ethics' (GER 40), Miriam Henson refers to the author's use of 'pier glass' imagery to illustrate her theory of morality and to show how an individual looks at the world from his self as the centre of moral vision and limitation. It is well known that Spinoza expounds his ethical theory in terms of geometrical concepts and physical theories of concentric and eccentric circles and lines etc. He was a lens grinder by profession and it is natural that he used to explore the mechanism of his trade in terms of …

Wreath-Laying In Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey 22 June 2010, Kathryn Hughes

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It seems extraordinary to think that ISO years ago Mary Ann Evans, a young woman with very few resources apart from a strong conscience and an enquiring mind, almost ruined her life by revealing to her father that she was no longer certain that the Bible was the literal word of God. Might it not instead be the work of men, she wondered, reaching out to report their sense of God at work in their own lives? Was it not, in fact, a record of human rather than divine history?

For this piece of heresy, as we know, Mary Ann …

Between Deafness And Sound: Aurality And The Limits Of Sympathy In The Mill On The Floss, Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In his review of The Mill on the Floss on 19 May 1860 for The Times, E. S. Dallas began by arguing that Eliot's first novel Adam Bede was successful because 'the temporary delight of listening to a pleasant tale' it gave its readers helped to achieve 'the permanent good of an increased sympathy with our kind'.1 Although the publication of The Mill on the Floss proved, according to Dallas, that 'George Eliot' was 'as great as ever', it could not match the triumph of Adam Bede because she was determined not to repeat the idealism of a world that …

The Thirty-Nine George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 2010- The Mill On The Floss And The Difficulties Of Relationships, Rosemary Ashton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

By late 1859, when she had almost finished writing The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot was still unsure of its final title. The working title was 'Sister Maggie', which was particularly appropriate to the first two thirds of the novel, where interest is concentrated on the pleasures and pains of the childhood relationship between Tom and Maggie Tulliver. But in the last third of the book, attention had turned to the romantic relationship between Maggie and Stephen Guest, itself intruding into Maggie's near-engagement to Philip Wakem, with Tom kept in the background until the death of brother and sister …

'Even Our Failures Are A Prophecy': The Mill On The Floss And The 1860s*, Marilyn Orr

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

My title comes from a poem, 'A Minor Prophet' " written by George Eliot in 1865, and I want to enlist its help in showing in this paper how the failures she experienced during the decade following the publication of The Mill on the Floss turned into a prophecy that shaped an aesthetic for the rest of her career.

Also known as 'My Vegetarian Friend’, this poem traces many of the important ideas that Eliot has been working with from the start of her career. It begins as a humorous characterization of 'a vegetarian seer', who anticipates a glorious 'Millennium' …

Divorcing Kin And Kind: Selective Generosity In "A Woman Killed With Kindness", Maya Mathur

English & Linguistics Articles

This article analyzes the division between kinship and kindness in the "A Woman Killed With Kindness" by Thomas Heywood.

Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven. Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. ISBN 90-420-0534-3 299 pages, bibliography, index. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek presents a framework of comparative literature based on a contextual (systemic and empirical) approach for the study of culture and literature and applies the framework in audience studies, film and literature, women's literature, translation studies, new media and scholarship in the humanities and in the analyses of English, French, German, Austrian, Hungarian, Romanian, and English-Canadian modern, contemporary, and ethnic minority texts. Copyright release to the author in 2006.

Wordsworth And Milton: The Prelude And Paradise Lost, Colin Mccormack

English Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The James Brothers And The Tragic Beauty Of Individualism, Corey Plante

English Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

"I Unsex'd My Dress": Lord Byron's Seduction Of Gender In "The Corsair", "Lara", And "Don Juan", Alexis Spiceland Lee

Dissertations

The goal of this project is to posit a theory of how Byron’s texts, specifically through the development of his hero, construct gender and sexuality as styles of seduction that resist easy classification by binary systems. I propose that Byron’s works characterize gender through ironic performances of seduction that, because they reveal that binary structures lack a stable core, dissolve systemic differentiation and thus fatally complicate any attempt to force the individual into rigid categories of gender or sexual identity. Byron’s works deploy seduction as a tactic of ironic representation of both gender and sexual practice that is necessarily multiplicitous …

Hole In The Head: A Play, Accompanied By A Conspectus Of Knowledge, Both Repressed And Researched, That Directly Influenced The Playwright In Her Development Of A New Work, Margaret Hunter Cook

Honors Scholar Theses

"Hole in the Head" is a play about a woman who wakes up. Maude wakes up in the first act, and in every subsequent scene she undergoes some form of physical or emotional awakening as characters walk in and out of her front door."Hole in the Head" is accompanied by an introduction that attempts to understand the interplay between creativity and academia through an analysis of theatre, feminist and queer theory, and science.

Ophelia's Mistreatment And Ignored Monastic Opportunities, Danielle Tovsen

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Thesis: I will argue that Ophelia could have saved her own life if she had left home and fled to a nunnery; the treatment she received from Laertes and Polonius was worse than Hamlet's treatment of her throughout the play and especially in Act 3 .1. Through thorough research, the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare, is explored. This thesis specifically focuses on the character of Ophelia and Ophelia's relationships with Hamlet, Laertes, and Polonius. Through the examination of Ophelia, with a literature review of Ophelia's reputation amongst scholars, the argument is made that Hamlet's treatment of Ophelia is one of …

(De)Constructing Jane: Converting Austen In Film Responses, Karen Gevirtz

Department of English Publications

No abstract provided.

Mirren's Autobiography: The Life And Poetry Of Marion Bernstein (1846-1906), Edward Cohen, Linda Fleming

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Dickinson And Smith: Years Apart But Not So Different, Nicole Day

English

Even though there were sixteen years separating them, Stevie Smith and Emily Dickinson had much in common. They both use death as a theme to explore and mock life. Their small poems have a lot to say about life and death.

Mrs. Meyrick's Cat, Derek Miller

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

'''Great God!" the words escaped Deronda' as he watched the just-prevented-from-drowning Mirah. 'The old thought had come now with a new impetus of mingled feeling, and urged that exclamation in which both East and West have for ages concentrated their awe in the presence of inexorable calamity.'!

Among those who welcome Mirah to Mrs. Meyrick's household is the cat Hafiz, seen by Deronda as it 'came forward with tail erect and rubbed himself against her ankles', an Eastern moment accompanying Mirah's entrance into the Meyrick family. Hafiz is later to purr as Mirah starts to tell her story to Mrs. …

Review Of Charles Dickens, Michael Slater

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On the first page of this splendid new biography, Dickens is cited referring to his own earliest writings as 'certain tragedies achieved at the mature age of eight or ten and represented with great applause to overflowing nurseries'. The genially tongue-in-cheek celebration of his own precociousness is entirely characteristic, with the final flourish of 'overflowing nurseries' an example of the kind of 'unnecessary detail' that Orwell identified as a typical device of Dickensian comedy. 'Overflowing' both transforms the brief recollection into a comic scene and indicates the essential quality of the creative imagination at work here. A very different writer …

Review Of Women Reviewing Women In Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Critical Reception Of Lane Austen, Charlotte Bronte And George Eliot, Joanne Wilkes

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The subtitle of Joanne Wilkes' elegant and meticulous monograph is somewhat misleading. Although Austen, Bronte and Eliot make regular appearances, as one would expect the three major female literary figures of the nineteenth century to do, the work does not seek to investigate their critical histories - something which Wilkes has already done in a compelling essay published in Joanne Shattock's collection Women and Literature in Britain, 1800-1900 (2001). Instead, Wilkes' attention here is firmly directed at the careers of the critics who, for the most part, remain on the margins of Victorian studies: Maria Jane Jewsbury, Sara Coleridge, Hannah …

'Hetty Had Never Read A Novel': Adam Bede And Realism, Rachel Bowlby

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It is not just the famous Chapter 17, 'In Which the Story Pauses a Little’, which makes George Eliot's Adam Bede one of the first candidates for any discussion of the tenets and aims of nineteenth-century literary realism. The question is opened in the very first paragraph of the novel - so very prominently, perhaps, and in so many dimensions, that we may miss its compacted meanings as we read on or rush on, past the beginning, to enter the narrative. Much of its meaning, of course, is not immediately available without the understandings that subsequent chapters will add, including …

George Eliot Birthday Luncheon, 22 November 2009- The Toast To The Immortal Memory, Beryl Gray

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

2009 is the 150th anniversary of the publication of two works of fiction by George Eliot. As no one here could fail to know, throughout the year there have been all kinds of celebrations of her first - and wonderful- novel, Adam Bede (and the word has spread even to London of great Adam Bede happenings in these parts). On the other hand, I've heard of nothing commemorating 'The Lifted Veil', which appeared in the same year as the novel. While this strange, supernatural tale of an acutely sensitive, unproductive poet whose clairvoyance alienates him from his fellow mortals is …

Japanese Branch Report- 2009, Yohko Nagai

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Overlooking the meandering Edo River and the panoramic view of the Tokyo skyline, the thirteenth annual convention of the George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at the scenic campus of Wayo Women's University on Saturday, 28 November 2009.

After an opening remark by Mizue Aida of Nihon University, a welcome address was made by Midori Uematsu, a professor of Wayo Women's University. This year we had the privilege of listening to four papers in the morning session. The first two papers were chaired by Akiko Kimura, of Waseda University and the last two papers by Itsuyo Shimizu of Kinki …

The Art Of Conduct, The Conduct Of Art And The 'Mixed Science' Of Eliot's Ethics: ' Sympathetic Impulse' And 'The Scientific Point Of View' In The Mill On The Floss, Simon Calder

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The Mill on the Floss is full of keys and clues. Most famously, Maggie Tolliver, following her father's bankruptcy, 'wanted some key that would enable her to understand and, in understanding, endure, the heavy weight that had fallen on her young heart.' 1 In chapter three of Book Four of Eliot's novel, Maggie believes herself to have found just such a key in Thomas a Kempis's The Imitation of Christ (MF, 298):

Here, then, was a secret of life that would enable her to renounce all other secrets ... [F]or the first time she saw the possibility of shifting the …

Editor's Note - 2010

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

1. The articles in this issue by Dinah Birch, Rachel Bowlby, Barbara Hardy, and Josephine McDonagh were originally delivered as papers at the Adam Bede conference held at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, on 7 November 2009.

George Eliot As Historian: The Case Of Mr. Crewe And Hugh Hughes, David Paterson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Historians look for as many different sources of evidence as they can to describe and interpret the past. How far is fiction a valid source? Great fiction may reveal great truths but is this only in a general sense? George Eliot herself seems to suggest above that reliance on 'descriptions of novelists' may be a perilous route to an accurate portrait: but what about relying on descriptions of those in her own books? Despite one specific denial, some of her 'portraits of clergymen' contain valuable historical elements.

An examination of one part of Scenes of Clerical Life shows George Eliot's …

The Representation Of Place In Middlemarch, Adam Wright

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Critics in the past have tended to refer to the rootedness of characters in George Eliot's novels. This is particularly true of Adam Bede, where the naturalistic roots of characters are often explicitly stated, such as when Dinah affirms 'I'm not free to leave Snowfield, where I was first planted, and have grown deep into it, like the small grass on the hill-top'.1 Catherine Middleton, in her essay 'Roots and Rootlessness', when analysing Middlemarch refers to seven different types of roots in just four pages (,emotional', 'physical', 'moral', 'affective', 'social', 'intellectual' ,and 'local').2 These terms not only complicate our understanding …