Prodigiously learned, alive to the massive social changes of her time, defiant of many Victorian orthodoxies, George Eliot has always challenged her readers. She is at once chronicler and analyst, ...novelist of nostalgia and monumental thinker. In her great novel Middlemarch she writes of 'that tempting range of relevancies called the universe'. This volume identifies a range of 'relevancies' that inform both her fictional and her non-fictional writings. The range and scale of her achievement are brought into focus by cogent essays on the many contexts - historical, intellectual, political, social, cultural - to her work. In addition there are discussions of her critical history and legacy, as well as of the material conditions of production and distribution of her novels and her journalism. The volume enables fuller understanding and appreciation, from a twenty-first-century standpoint, of the life and work of one of the nineteenth century's major writers.
This work examines the range of the colonial imaginary in Eliot's works, from the domestic and regional to ancient and speculative colonialisms. It challenges monolithic, hegemonic views of George ...Eliot - whose novelistic career paralleled the creation of British India - and also dismissals of the postcolonial as a historical. It uncovers often-overlooked colonized figures in the novels and also investigates Victorian Islamophobia in light of Eliot's impatience with ignorance, intolerance, and xenophobia as well as her interrogation of the make-believe of endings.
Gillian Beer's landmark book demonstrates how Darwin overturned fundamental cultural assumptions in his narratives, how George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and other writers pursued and resisted their ...contradictory implications, and how the stories he produced about natural selection and the struggle for life now underpin our culture. This second edition of Darwin's Plots incorporates a new preface by the author and a foreword by the distinguished American scholar George Levine.
Patricia McKee demonstrates that Richardson, Eliot, and James see disorderliness and indeterminacy in the human self, human relations, and literature as primary sources of meaningfulness. The ...relationships these novels portray as most satisfying are unsettled and unsettling, interfering with rather than contributing to social stability.
Originally published in 1986.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
George Eliot has been widely praised both for the richness of her prose and the universality of her themes. In this compelling study, Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone goes beyond these traditional foci to ...examine the role of aggression in Eliot's fiction and to find its source in the author's unconscious sense of loss stemming from traumatic family separations and deaths during her childhood and adolescence. Johnstone demonstrates that Eliot's creative work was a constructive response to her sense of loss and that the repeating patterns in her novels reflect the process of release from her state of mourning for lost loved ones.
Great Shakespeareans offers a systematic account of those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and ...internationally. In this volume, leading scholars assess the contribution of Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy to the afterlife and reception of Shakespeare and his plays. Each substantial contribution assesses the double impact of Shakespeare on the figure covered and of the figure on the understanding, interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare, provide a sketch of their subject's intellectual and professional biography and an account of the wider cultural context, including comparison with other figures or works within the same field.
This new biography of George Eliot is not just the story of her life. It gives an account of what it means to become a novelist, and to think like a novelist. Philip Davis enables you not only to see ...through George Eliot's eyes, but also feel what it is like to be seen by her, in the imaginative involvement of her readers with her characters.
Gillian Beer's classic Darwin's Plots, one of the most influential works of literary criticism and cultural history of the last quarter century, is here reissued in an updated edition to coincide ...with the anniversary of Darwin's birth and of the publication of The Origin of Species. Its focus on how writers, including George Eliot, Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hardy, responded to Darwin's discoveries and to his innovations in scientific language continues to open up new approaches to Darwin's thought and to its effects in the culture of his contemporaries. This third edition includes an important new essay that investigates Darwin's concern with consciousness across all forms of organic life. It demonstrates how this fascination persisted throughout his career and affected his methods and discoveries. With an updated bibliography reflecting recent work in the field, this book will retain its place at the heart of Victorian studies.
Scholarship on George Eliot's 1860s Condition-of-England novel Felix Holt has been divided on whether it signals the racist nativism of its decade or advocates for inclusive, willed national ...belonging. This paper proposes that it accomplishes both, promoting what I call "willed ethnonationalism." A counterintuitive phrase, willed ethnonationalism captures how Eliot's novel both defines the nation-form against race belonging and encourages modern nationals to perform racial self-identification. I argue that this stance emerged from Eliot's engagement with Ernest Renan's philological career. Recalling how theories of racial-linguistic inheritance influenced a Zeitgeist of thinking around constructed nations (epitomized by Renan's 1882 essay on nationalism), I show how mythic ideas about racial roots informed the ostensibly rational form of the nationstate as expressed in late nineteenth-century fiction and essayistic prose.
Full text
Available for:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
