Fictional Minds and Interpersonal Relationships in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss

Fictional Minds and Interpersonal Relationships in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss PDF Author: Karam Nayebpour
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527517985
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
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.

Fictional Minds and Interpersonal Relationships in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss

Fictional Minds and Interpersonal Relationships in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss PDF Author: Karam Nayebpour
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527517985
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Novel Relations

Novel Relations PDF Author: Alicia Mireles Christoff
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691234590
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
The first comprehensive look at how Victorian fiction and British psychoanalysis shaped each other Novel Relations engages twentieth-century post-Freudian British psychoanalysis in an unprecedented way: as literary theory. Placing the writing of figures like D. W. Winnicott, W. R. Bion, Michael and Enid Balint, Joan Riviere, Paula Heimann, and Betty Joseph in conversation with canonical Victorian fiction, Alicia Christoff reveals just how much object relations can teach us about how and why we read. These thinkers illustrate the ever-shifting impact our relations with others have on the psyche, and help us see how literary figures—characters, narrators, authors, and other readers—shape and structure us too. For Christoff, novels are charged relational fields. Closely reading novels by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, Christoff shows that traditional understandings of Victorian fiction change when we fully recognize the object relations of reading. It is not by chance that British psychoanalysis illuminates underappreciated aspects of Victorian fiction so vibrantly: Victorian novels shaped modern psychoanalytic theories of psyche and relationality—including the eclipsing of empire and race in the construction of subject. Relational reading opens up both Victorian fiction and psychoanalysis to wider political and postcolonial dimensions, while prompting a closer engagement with work in such areas as critical race theory and gender and sexuality studies. The first book to examine at length the connections between British psychoanalysis and Victorian fiction, Novel Relations describes the impact of literary form on readers and on twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of the subject.

The Ethical Vision of George Eliot

The Ethical Vision of George Eliot PDF Author: Thomas Albrecht
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000029263
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
The Ethical Vision of George Eliot is one of the first monographs devoted entirely to the ethical thought of George Eliot, a profoundly significant, influential figure not only in nineteenth-century English and European literature, nineteenth-century women’s writing, the history of the novel, and Victorian intellectual culture, but also in the field of literary ethics. Ethics are a predominant theme in Eliot’s fictional and non-fictional writings. Her ethical insights and ideas are a defining element of her greatness as an artist and novelist. Through meticulous close readings of Eliot’s fiction, essays, and letters, The Ethical Vision of George Eliot presents an original, complex definition of her ethical vision as she developed it over the course of her career. It examines major novels like Adam Bede, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda; many of Eliot’s most significant essays; and devotes two entire chapters to Eliot’s final book Impressions of Theophrastus Such, an idiosyncratic collection of character sketches that Eliot scholars have heretofore generally overlooked or ignored. The Ethical Vision of George Eliot demonstrates that Eliot defined her ethical vision alternately in terms of revealing and strengthening a fundamental human communion that links us to other persons, however different and remote from ourselves; and in terms of recognizing and respecting the otherness of other persons, and of the universe more generally, from ourselves. Over the course of her career, Eliot increasingly transitions from the former towards the latter imperative, but she also considerably complicates her conception of otherness, and of what it means to be ethically responsible to it.

Novel Relations

Novel Relations PDF Author: Alicia Mireles Christoff
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069119310X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
The first comprehensive look at how Victorian fiction and British psychoanalysis shaped each other Novel Relations engages twentieth-century post-Freudian British psychoanalysis in an unprecedented way: as literary theory. Placing the writing of figures like D. W. Winnicott, W. R. Bion, Michael and Enid Balint, Joan Riviere, Paula Heimann, and Betty Joseph in conversation with canonical Victorian fiction, Alicia Christoff reveals just how much object relations can teach us about how and why we read. These thinkers illustrate the ever-shifting impact our relations with others have on the psyche, and help us see how literary figures—characters, narrators, authors, and other readers—shape and structure us too. For Christoff, novels are charged relational fields. Closely reading novels by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, Christoff shows that traditional understandings of Victorian fiction change when we fully recognize the object relations of reading. It is not by chance that British psychoanalysis illuminates underappreciated aspects of Victorian fiction so vibrantly: Victorian novels shaped modern psychoanalytic theories of psyche and relationality—including the eclipsing of empire and race in the construction of subject. Relational reading opens up both Victorian fiction and psychoanalysis to wider political and postcolonial dimensions, while prompting a closer engagement with work in such areas as critical race theory and gender and sexuality studies. The first book to examine at length the connections between British psychoanalysis and Victorian fiction, Novel Relations describes the impact of literary form on readers and on twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of the subject.

Essays of George Eliot

Essays of George Eliot PDF Author: Thomas Pinney
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317294092
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
This collection, first published in 1963, includes 29 of George Eliot’s essays written between 1846 and 1868. Through these essays, Pinney has managed to convey her range of subject-matters and variety of style. This title, with an introduction and footnotes written by the editor, will be of particular interest to students of literature.

The Lifted Veil

The Lifted Veil PDF Author: George Eliot
Publisher: Xist Publishing
ISBN: 1623958318
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 46

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Book Description
The Lifted Veil by George Eliot is a gothic novella in the vein of other Victorian horror stories like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Bram Stoker's Dracula. In The Lifted Veil, the unreliable narrator, Latimer, believes that he is cursed with an otherworldly ability to see into the future and the thoughts of other people. This leads to tragedy as his obsession with his brother's fiancee. This Xist Classics edition has been professionally formatted for e-readers with a linked table of contents. This eBook also contains a bonus book club leadership guide and discussion questions. We hope you’ll share this book with your friends, neighbors and colleagues and can’t wait to hear what you have to say about it. Xist Publishing is a digital-first publisher. Xist Publishing creates books for the touchscreen generation and is dedicated to helping everyone develop a lifetime love of reading, no matter what form it takes

Fictions of Home

Fictions of Home PDF Author: Martin Mühlheim
Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
ISBN: 3772056377
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
This study aims to counter right-wing discourses of belonging. It discusses key theoretical concepts for the study of home, focusing in particular on Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic contributions. The book also maintains that postmodern celebrations of nomadism and exile tend to be incapable of providing an alternative to conservative, xenophobic appropriations of home. In detailed readings of one film and six novels, a view is developed according to which home, as a spatio-temporal imaginary, is rooted in our species being, and as such constitutes the inevitable starting point for any progressive politics.

Fictional Minds

Fictional Minds PDF Author: Alan Palmer
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803237438
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
"Readers create a continuing consciousness out of scattered references to a particular character and read this consciousness as an "embedded narrative" within the whole narrative of the novel. The combination of these embedded narratives forms the plot. This perspective on narrative enables us to explore hitherto neglected aspects of fictional minds such as dispositions, emotions, and action. It also highlights the social public and dialogic mind and the "mind beyond the skin." For example much of our thought is intermental, or joint, group or shared; even our identity is to an extent socially distributed.".

Thinking Without Thinking in the Victorian Novel

Thinking Without Thinking in the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Vanessa L. Ryan
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421405911
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
In Thinking without Thinking in the Victorian Novel, Vanessa L. Ryan demonstrates how both the form and the experience of reading novels played an important role in ongoing debates about the nature of consciousness during the Victorian era. Revolutionary developments in science during the mid- and late nineteenth century—including the discoveries and writings of Herbert Spencer, William Carpenter, and George Henry Lewes—had a vital impact on fiction writers of the time. Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Henry James read contributions in what we now call cognitive science that asked, "what is the mind?" These Victorian fiction writers took a crucial step, asking how we experience our minds, how that experience relates to our behavior and questions of responsibility, how we can gain control over our mental reflexes, and finally how fiction plays a special role in understanding and training our minds. Victorian fiction writers focus not only on the question of how the mind works but also on how it seems to work and how we ought to make it work. Ryan shows how the novelistic emphasis on dynamic processes and functions—on the activity of the mind, rather than its structure or essence—can also be seen in some of the most exciting and comprehensive scientific revisions of the understanding of "thinking" in the Victorian period. This book studies the way in which the mind in the nineteenth-century view is embedded not just in the body but also in behavior, in social structures, and finally in fiction.

The Victorian Novel in Context

The Victorian Novel in Context PDF Author: Grace Moore
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1847064892
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Structured in 3-parts, this book focuses on immediate contexts, key texts, and wider contexts enables development from background issues through the actual literary texts to criticism and afterlives.