Introduction Armstrong, Isobel; Burdett, Carolyn
19: interdisciplinary studies in the long nineteenth century,
03/2020, Volume:
2020, Issue:
29
Journal Article
British Victorians were obsessed with fluids-with their scarcity and with their omnipresence. By the mid-nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of citizens regularly petitioned the government to ...provide running water and adequate sewerage, while scientists and journalists fretted over the circulation of bodily fluids. InThe Social Life of Fluids, Jules Law traces the fantasies of power and anxieties of identity precipitated by these developments as they found their way into the plotting and rhetoric of the Victorian novel.
Analyzing the expression of scientific understanding and the technological manipulation of fluids-blood, breast milk, and water-in six Victorian novels (by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, George Moore, and Bram Stoker), Law traces the growing anxiety about fluids in Victorian culture from the beginning of the sanitarian movement in the 1830s through the 1890s. Fluids, he finds, came to be regarded as the most alienable aspect of an otherwise inalienable human body, and, paradoxically, as the least rational element of an increasingly rationalized environment.
Drawing on literary and feminist theory, social history, and the history of science and medicine, Law shows how fluids came to be represented as prosthetic extensions of identity, exposing them to contested claims of kinship and community and linking them inextricably to public spaces and public debates.
George Eliot Hardy, Barbara
2006, 2006-10-09
eBook
Not for publication: 'promises to present the distilled understanding and insight of Professor Hardy's lifetime engagement with George Eliot...strengths lie in the sensitive close reading that ...distinguishes Barbara Hardy's criticism and in the fascinating links and echoes between life and fiction that her comprehensive knowledge of the novelist's writing enables her to find...the proposed book would be accessible to a wide general readership and Barbara Hardy's established reputation would be a selling point in itself.' Readers report from John Rignall (Reader at University of Warwick and editor of The Oxford Reader's Companion to George Eliot) 'a genuinely interesting contribution to George Eliot scholarship by one of the leading postwar critics of Victorian fiction. The conception is bold and arresting... it reads excellently but its clarity is also vivid, effective and engaging. It wears its evident deep learning, and informed familiarity with Eliot's world, lightly'It manages to integrate three achievements: to give an animated sense of Eliot's personality as a woman, an intellectual, and a writer; it evokes successfully the milieu in which she lived and worked; and it offers genuine illumination in relation to the fiction.' Professor Rick Rylance, Deputy Head of English Department, University of Exeter (and former Chair of Council for College and University English) Review of Thomas Hardy by NATFHE: 'The community of critics and readers interested in Victorian studies can always expect Barbara Hardy to come up with an interesting perspective on texts we all thought had been read thoroughly into familiarity'The beauty of this book is also that a whole range of people could read it, from A level students to Hardy specialists.'
Before George Eliot Dillane, Fionnuala
08/2013, Volume:
v.Series Number 88
eBook
Fionnuala Dillane revisits the first decade of Marian Evans's working life to explore the influence of the periodical press on her emergence as George Eliot and on her subsequent responses to fame. ...This interdisciplinary study discusses the significance of Evans's work as a journalist, editor and serial-fiction writer in the periodical press from the late 1840s to the late 1850s and positions this early career against critical responses to Evans's later literary persona, George Eliot. Dillane argues that Evans's association with the nineteenth-century periodical industry, that dominant cultural force of the age, is important for its illumination of Evans's understanding of the formation of reading audiences, the development of literary genres and the cultivation of literary celebrity.
Introduction: the big "S" -- Travels abroad : taking the waters -- Months of Sundays -- Between Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda : singers, lovers, and others -- The salons, the spas, and Daniel ...Deronda -- John Cross and the last spa
In this innovative study Nancy Henry introduces a set of facts that place George Eliot's life and work within the contexts of mid-nineteenth-century British colonialism and imperialism. Henry ...examines Eliot's roles as an investor in colonial stocks, a parent to emigrant sons, and a reader of colonial literature. She highlights the importance of these contexts to our understanding of both Eliot's fiction and her situation within Victorian culture. Henry argues that Eliot's decision to represent the empire only as it infiltrated the imaginations and domestic lives of her characters illuminates the nature of her Realism. The book also re-examines the assumptions of postcolonial criticism about Victorian fiction and its relation to empire.
George Eliot (1819-1880) is known for her psychoanalysis of the majority of her characters in her literary works. In her second novel, The Mill on the Floss (1860), she focuses on the fictional ...minds' subjective first thoughts and intentions. She shows how their unsympathetic workings cause private and collective tragedy by the end of narrative. The novel has frequently been acclaimed by critics and readers alike. However, this book presents a re-evaluation of the text with the help of terminologies borrowed from cognitive narratology in order to shed new light on the significance of one-track minds in this narrative. The book explores the mental functioning of the individual fictional minds, and examines how different modes of mental activities influence the interpersonal relationships between and among the characters. Accordingly, the study argues that the main cause of tragedy in The Mill on the Floss stems from at least two factors. First, the central fictional minds primarily function on the basis of their self-centered thoughts and emotions, over which they usually do not have control. Second, the tragedy is an effect of the social minds' or public opinion's unforgetting, unforgiving, and unsympathetic perspectives of any unconventional behavior.
This collection offers students and scholars of Eliot’s work a timely critical reappraisal of her corpus, including her poetry and non-fiction, reflecting the latest developments in literary ...criticism. It features innovative analysis exploring the relation between Eliot’s Victorian intellectual sensibilities and those of our own era.A comprehensive collection of essays written by leading Eliot scholarsOffers a contemporary reappraisals of Eliot’s work reflecting a broad range of current academic interests, including religion, science, ethics, politics, and aestheticsReflects the very latest developments in literary scholarshipTraces the revealing links between Eliot’s Victorian intellectual concerns and those of today
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