George Eliot and Victorian Historiography

George Eliot and Victorian Historiography PDF Author: Neil McCaw
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230286941
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
In this new study of George Eliot's fiction, textual attempts to imagine a coherent and unified national past are seen as producing a contradictory vision of Englishness. It is a historiographical national identity, constructed in the image of predominant, and conflicting, trends in the Victorian writing of history. The inherent uncertainty caused by the shift between different perceptions of English history leads, in the later fiction, to an abandonment of contemporaneous grand narratives. The consequence is a history that anticipates a more modern, radical philosophy of history.

George Eliot and Victorian Historiography

George Eliot and Victorian Historiography PDF Author: Neil McCaw
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230286941
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
In this new study of George Eliot's fiction, textual attempts to imagine a coherent and unified national past are seen as producing a contradictory vision of Englishness. It is a historiographical national identity, constructed in the image of predominant, and conflicting, trends in the Victorian writing of history. The inherent uncertainty caused by the shift between different perceptions of English history leads, in the later fiction, to an abandonment of contemporaneous grand narratives. The consequence is a history that anticipates a more modern, radical philosophy of history.

George Eliot in Context

George Eliot in Context PDF Author: Margaret Harris
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521764084
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
George Eliot's literary achievement is explored through essays on its historical, intellectual, political and social contexts.

George Eliot

George Eliot PDF Author: Jan Jedrzejewski
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134632568
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
This comprehensive guide to one of the most successful yet controversial writers of the Victorian period introduces the contexts and many interpretations of her work, from publication to the present. & nbsp.

Censorship and the Representation of the Sacred in Nineteenth-Century England

Censorship and the Representation of the Sacred in Nineteenth-Century England PDF Author: Jan-Melissa Schramm
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192560557
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
Throughout the nineteenth century, the performance of sacred drama on the English public stage was prohibited by law and custom left over from the Reformation: successive Examiners of Plays, under the control of the Lord Chamberlain's Office, censored and suppressed both devotional and blasphemous plays alike. Whilst the Biblical sublime found expression in the visual arts, the epic, and the oratorio, nineteenth-century spoken drama remained secular by force of precedent and law. The maintenance of this ban was underpinned by Protestant anxieties about bodily performance, impersonation, and the power of the image that persisted long after the Reformation, and that were in fact bolstered by the return of Catholicism to public prominence after the passage of the Catholic Relief Act in 1829 and the restoration of the Catholic Archbishoprics in 1850. But even as anti-Catholic prejudice at mid-century reached new heights, the turn towards medievalism in the visual arts, antiquarianism in literary history, and the 'popular' in constitutional reform placed England's pre- Reformation past at the centre of debates about the uses of the public stage and the functions of a truly national drama. This book explores the recovery of the texts of the extant mystery-play cycles undertaken by antiquarians in the early nineteenth century and the eventual return of sacred drama to English public theatres at the start of the twentieth century. Consequently, law, literature, politics, and theatre history are brought into conversation with one another in order to illuminate the history of sacred drama and Protestant ant-theatricalism in England in the long nineteenth-century.

George Eliot and the British Empire

George Eliot and the British Empire PDF Author: Nancy Henry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139432699
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
In this 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 and Nineteenth-Century Science

George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science PDF Author: Sally Shuttleworth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521335843
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
This study explores the ways in which George Eliot's involvement with contemporary scientific theory affected the evolution of her fiction. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Comte, Spencer, Lewes, Bain, Carpenter, von Hartmann and Bernard, Dr Shuttleworth shows how, as Eliot moved from Adam Bede to Daniel Deronda, her conception of a conservative, static and hierarchical model of society gave way to a more dynamic model of social and psychological life.

George Eliot, European Novelist

George Eliot, European Novelist PDF Author: Dr John Rignall
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409478831
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Reading George Eliot as a European novelist among other European novelists, John Rignall explores her use of European travel, scenes and locations in her fiction and also places her novels in conversation with the work of other major European writers. Throughout the book, Rignall shows Eliot's engagement with the cultures of France and Germany, suggestively making the case that Eliot's novels belong to the tradition of the European novel that descends from Cervantes. Rignall develops the fundamental theme of Eliot's position as a European novelist in chapters that explore the significance of Eliot's first visit to Germany with G. H. Lewes, Eliot's ideas on the cultural differences between French and German writing, the incidental part travel plays in novels such as Daniel Deronda and Middlemarch, the role of European landscapes in her fiction, the dialogical relationship between Eliot and Balzac, comparisons between Middlemarch and Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and connections between the novels of Eliot, Gottfried Keller and Theodor Fontane. Daniel Deronda is examined both within the wider context of European Jewish life and as part of a tradition of French novels that harkens back to Balzac and anticipates Proust. Rignall's final chapter takes up Nietzsche's notorious criticism of Eliot in Twilight of the Idols, showing that Eliot, with her sceptical intelligence, insight into the essentially metaphorical nature of language, and grasp of modernity, has something in common with this philosophical iconoclast.

Spirit Becomes Matter

Spirit Becomes Matter PDF Author: Henry Staten
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748694595
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
Explains how, under the influence of the new ''mental materialism'' that held sway in mid-Victorian scientific and medical thought, the Bront1/2s and George Eliot in their greatest novels broached a radical new form of novelistic moral psychology.

The Dynamics of Genre

The Dynamics of Genre PDF Author: Dallas Liddle
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813930421
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals reached a peak of cultural influence and financial success in Britain in the 1850s and 1860s, out-publishing and out-selling books as much as one hundred to one. But although scholars have long known that writing for the vast periodical marketplace provided many Victorian authors with needed income—and sometimes even with full second careers as editors and journalists—little has been done to trace how the midcentury ascendancy of periodical discourses might have influenced Victorian literary discourse. In The Dynamics of Genre, Dallas Liddle innovatively combines Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogic approach to genre with methodological tools from periodicals studies, literary criticism, and the history of the book to offer the first rigorous study of the relationship between mid-Victorian journalistic genres and contemporary poetry, the novel, and serious expository prose. Liddle shows that periodical genres competed both ideologically and economically with literary genres, and he studies how this competition influenced the midcentury writings and careers of authors including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Harriet Martineau, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and the sensation novelists of the 1860s. Some Victorian writers directly adopted the successful genre forms and worldview of journalism, but others such as Eliot strongly rejected them, while Trollope launched his successful career partly by using fiction to analyze journalism’s growing influence in British society. Liddle argues that successful interpretation of the works of these and many other authors will be fully possible only when scholars learn to understand the journalistic genre forms with which mid-Victorian literary forms interacted and competed.

The Buried Life of Things

The Buried Life of Things PDF Author: Simon Goldhill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107087481
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Simon Goldhill offers a fascinating new perspective on the material culture of nineteenth-century Britain.