It is well known that George Eliot's intelligence and her wide knowledge of literature, history, philosophy and religion shaped her fiction, but until now no study has followed the development of her ...thinking through her whole career. This intellectual biography traces the course of that development from her initial Christian culture, through her loss of faith and working out of a humanistic and cautiously progressive world view, to the thought-provoking achievements of her novels. It focuses on her responses to her reading in her essays, reviews and letters as well as in the historical pictures of Romola, the political implications of Felix Holt, the comprehensive view of English society in Middlemarch, and the visionary account of personal inspiration in Daniel Deronda. This portrait of a major Victorian intellectual is an important addition to our understanding of Eliot's mind and works, as well as of her place in nineteenth-century British culture.
Reading for our time Miller, J. Hillis; Miller, J. Hillis
2012., 20120305, 2012, 2012-03-05
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Can reading Adam Bede and Middlemarch be justified in this time of climate change, financial meltdown and ineffective politicians? J. Hillis Miller shows how, to be read for today, they must be read ...slowly, closely and carefully, with much attention to linguistic detail and especially to figures of speech. By relating mistakes like Dorothea's about Casaubon to current affairs, Miller's 'readings for today' can help us to come to terms with our human, social and political situation and even inspire us to act to ameliorate it.
The body economic Gallagher, Catherine
2006., 20090110, 2009, 2005, 2006-01-01
eBook
The Body Economic revises the intellectual history of nineteenth-century Britain by demonstrating that political economists and the writers who often presented themselves as their literary ...antagonists actually held most of their basic social assumptions in common. Catherine Gallagher demonstrates that political economists and their Romantic and early-Victorian critics jointly relocated the idea of value from the realm of transcendent spirituality to that of organic "life," making human sensations--especially pleasure and pain--the sources and signs of that value. Classical political economy, this book shows, was not a mechanical ideology but a form of nineteenth-century organicism, which put the body and its feelings at the center of its theories, and neoclassical economics built itself even more self-consciously on physiological premises. The Body Economic explains how these shared views of life, death, and sensation helped shape and were modified by the two most important Victorian novelists: Charles Dickens and George Eliot. It reveals how political economists interacted crucially with the life sciences of the nineteenth century--especially with psychophysiology and anthropology--producing the intellectual world that nurtured not only George Eliot's realism but also turn-of-the-century literary modernism.
George Eliot's Religious Imagination addresses the much-discussed question of Eliot's relation to Christianity in the wake of the sociocultural revolution triggered by the spread of theories of ...evolution. The standard view is that the author of Middlemarch and Silas Marner "lost her faith" at this time of religious crisis. Orr argues for a more nuanced understanding of the continuity of Eliot's work, as one not shattered by science, but shaped by its influence.Orr's wide-ranging and fascinating analysis situates George Eliot in the fertile intellectual landscape of the nineteenth century, among thinkers as diverse as Ludwig Feuerbach, David Strauss, and Sren Kierkegaard. She also argues for a connection between George Eliot and the twentieth-century evolutionary Christian thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Her analysis draws on the work of contemporary philosopher Richard Kearney as well as writers on mysticism, particularly Karl Rahner.The book takes an original look at questions many believe settled, encouraging readers to revisit George Eliot's work. Orr illuminates the creative tension that still exists between science and religion, a tension made fruitful through the exercise of the imagination. Through close readings of Eliot's writings, Orr demonstrates how deeply the novelist's religious imagination continued to operate in her fiction and poetry.
In a probing analysis that has broad implications for theories of reading, Bernard J. Paris explores how personal needs and changes in his own psychology have affected his responses to George Eliot ...over the years. Having lost his earlier enthusiasm for her “Religion of Humanity,” he now appreciates the psychological intuitions that are embodied in her brilliant portraits of characters and relationships. Concentrating on Eliot’s most impressive psychological novels, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, Paris focuses on her detailed portrayals of major characters in an effort to recover her intuitions and appreciate her mimetic achievement. He argues that although she intended for her characters to provide confirmation of her views, she was instead led to deeper, more enduring truths, although she did not consciously comprehend the discoveries she had made. Like her characters, Paris argues, these truths must be disengaged from her rhetoric in order to be perceived.
It is one of the curiosities of history that the most remarkable novel about Jews and Judaism, predicting the establishment of the Jewish state, should have been written in 1876 by a non-Jew a ...Victorian woman and a formidable intellectual, who is generally regarded as one of the greatest of English novelists. And it is still more curious that Daniel Deronda, George Eliot's last novel, should have been dismissed, by many of her admirers at the time and by some critics since, as something of an anomaly, an inexplicable and unfortunate turn in her life and work. Yet Eliot herself was passionately committed to that novel, having prepared herself for it by an extraordinary feat of scholarly research in five languages (including Hebrew), exploring the ancient, medieval, and modern sources of Jewish history. Three years later, to reenforce that commitment, she wrote an essay, the very last of her writing, reaffirming the heritage of the Jewish nation" and the desirability of a Jewish state this well before the founders of Zionism had conceived of that mission. Why did this Victorian novelist, born a Christian and an early convert to agnosticism, write a book so respectful of Judaism and so prescient about Zionism? And why at a time when there were no pogroms or persecutions to provoke her? What was the general conception of the Jewish question," and how did Eliot reinterpret that question," for her time as well as ours? Gertrude Himmelfarb, a leading Victorian scholar, has undertaken to unravel the mysteries of Daniel Deronda. And the mysteries of Eliot herself: a novelist who deliberately wrote a book she knew would bewilder many of her readers, a distinguished woman who opposed the enfranchisement of women, a moralist who flouted the most venerable of marital conventions above all, the author of a novel that is still an inspiration or
provocation to readers and critics alike.
This study shows how aesthetics and economics have been combined in a great work of literature. Frost examines the history of Middlemarch's composition and publication within the context of Victorian ...demand, then goes on to consider the interpretation, reception and consumption of the book.
Before George Eliot Dillane, Fionnuala
08/2013, Letnik:
v.Series Number 88
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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.
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.'
