Introduction : the integrated mind -- Jane Austen and self-consciousness -- "A mind lively and at ease" : imagination and Emma -- "You pierce my soul" : feeling embodied and persuasion -- George ...Eliot and other-consciousness -- "A voice like music" : the problem of other minds and Middlemarch -- "Beloved ideas made flesh" : the embodied mind and Daniel Deronda -- Thomas Hardy and nonintrospective consciousness -- "Now I am melancholy mad" : mood and Jude the obscure -- "That blue narcotic haze" : dreams, dissociation, and Tess of the d'Urbervilles -- Coda : the neurology of narrative
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.
The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel, first published in 2000, brings together two traditionally antagonistic fields, book history and narrative theory, to challenge established theories of 'the ...rise of the novel'. Leah Price shows that far from leveling class or gender distinctions, as has long been claimed, the novel has consistently located them within its own audience. Shedding new light on Richardson and Radcliffe, Scott and George Eliot, this book asks why the epistolary novel disappeared, how the book review emerged, why eighteenth-century abridgers designed their books for women while Victorian publishers marketed them to men, and how editors' reproduction of old texts has shaped authors' production of new ones. This innovative study will change the way we think not just about the history of reading, but about the genealogy of the canon wars, the future of intellectual property, and the role that anthologies play in our own classrooms.
The life story of the Victorian novelist George Eliot is as dramatic and complex as her best plots. This new assessment of her life and work combines recent biographical research with penetrating ...literary criticism, resulting in revealing new interpretations of her literary work. A fresh look at George Eliot's captivating life story Includes original new analysis of her writing Deploys the latest biographical research Combines literary criticism with biographical narrative to offer a rounded perspective
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. George Eliot's work has been subject to a wide range of critical ...questioning, most of which relates her substantially to a Victorian context and intellectual framework. This book examines the ways in which her work anticipates significant aspects of writing in the twentieth and indeed twenty first century in regard to both art and philosophy. This new book presents a series of linked essays exploring Eliot's credentials as a radical thinker. Opening with her relationship to the Romantic tradition, Newton goes on to discuss her reading of Darwinism, her radical critique of Victorian values and her affiliation with the modernists. The final essays discuss her work in relation to Derridean themes and to Bernard Williams' concept of moral luck. What emerges is a very different Eliot from the conservative figure portrayed in much critical literature.
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.
In this stimulating intellectual history of the ideas behind George Eliot’s novels, Bernard Semmel argues that the popularity of Eliot’s fiction can be attributed to a nostalgia for a lost heritage. ...Writing at a time when society was transforming itself from a traditional to a modern one, Eliot, however, viewed herself as intellectually ‘disinherited’, largely because of her estrangement from her father and brother. Through detailed analyses of Eliot’s novels, and a study of the intellectual currents of the time, Semmel demonstrates that the theme of inheritance provided the central ideas in Eliot’s novels. Semmel argues that Eliot wrote of inheritance both in the common meaning of the term, as in the transfer of goods and property from parents to children, and in the more metaphoric sense of the inheritance of both the benefits and the burdens of the historical past, particularly those of the nation’s culture and traditions (Eliot viewed nationality as an especially important moral force). Semmel also sees Eliot’s use of the politics of inheritance as a debt to the philosophical view called Positivism, which was a major force in nineteenth-century culture. Eliot’s difficult personal associations with leading Positivists, however, led her to a political compromise that pervades her later work. Semmel dissects the Politics of Middlemarch and convincingly demonstrates Eliot’s variations on the theme of inheritance and her acceptance of the gradualist reform processes in (as opposed to a radiacl criticism of) Britain’s political life.
The egotism that fuels the desire for greatness has been associated exclusively with men, according to one feminist view; yet many women cannot suppress the need to strive for greatness. In this ...forceful and compelling book, Alison Booth traces through the novels, essays, and other writings of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf radically conflicting attitudes on the part of each toward the possibility of feminine greatness. Examining the achievements of Eliot and Woolf in their social contexts, she provides a challenging model of feminist historical criticism.The egotism that fuels the desire for greatness has been associated exclusively with men, according to one feminist view; yet many women cannot suppress the need to strive for greatness. In this forceful and compelling book, Alison Booth traces through the novels, essays, and other writings of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf radically conflicting attitudes on the part of each toward the possibility of feminine greatness. Examining the achievements of Eliot and Woolf in their social contexts, she provides a challenging model of feminist historical criticism.
Carnival and crisis in three stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne -- Oppositionality in Fielding's Tom Jones -- Carnival diminished : the secret springs of Tristram Shandy -- Non-carnivalesque ...oppositionality : Jane Austen and the golden mean -- Checks and balances : Charles Dickens's A tale of two cities -- Across the boundaries of the self : George Eliot's Daniel Deronda -- Carnival reversals : Thomas Hardy's The mayor of Casterbridge -- Morphology of crisis : non-contact measurement of self in Conrad's "The secret sharer" -- Carnivalization : throwaways in Joyce's Ulysses -- Discourse of Lent : Kafka's "A hunger artist" and Shalamov's "The artist of the spade".
