This collection offers students and scholars of Eliot’s work a timely critical reappraisal of her corpus, including her poetry and non-fiction, reflecting the latest developments in literary criticism. It features innovative analysis exploring the relation between Eliot’s Victorian intellectual sensibilities and those of our own era. A comprehensive collection of essays written by leading Eliot scholars Offers a contemporary reappraisals of Eliot’s work reflecting a broad range of current academic interests, including religion, science, ethics, politics, and aesthetics Reflects the very latest developments in literary scholarship Traces the revealing links between Eliot’s Victorian intellectual concerns and those of today
This volume of essays is comprehensively, scholarly and lucidly written, and at the same time offers original insights into the work of one of the most important Victorian novelists, and into her complex and often scandalous career.
'Scholarly, ambitious and scrupulous'. This is how the TLS recently described the Oxford Reader's Companion Series. In September 2000, the book which pioneered the series, The Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens, came out in paperback. Now the Oxford Reader's Companions to Trollope, Hardy, Conrad, and George Eliot will follow on from its success. In this format each of these books, designed specifically to appeal to students of literature, contains a more comprehensive and accessiblerange of information than any other reference works on these writers. George Eliot was not only a great novelist but an important journalist and translator too, and her intellectual interests ranged far beyond literature and across many different cultures. The challenge faced by the compilers of this Companion was to do justice to the extraordinary range and depth of her intellectual life and creative work. The result is the most comprehensive guide to the life and work of George Eliot everwritten. There is much interest in George Eliot both in scholarly circles and amongst general readers of Victorian fiction. This Companion offers not only information and analysis of George Eliot's novels but also coverage of short stories, essays, poetry and translations, letters, and journals. Over 50 literary scholars from a variety of backgrounds from around the world contribute the latest thinking and expertise to this Companion. Entries include: Life of George Eliot: health, travels, pets owned by George Eliot, brothers and sisters of George Eliot Friends and associates: Lord Acton, Charles Bray, Florence Nightingale, Anthony Trollope Novels: Adam Bede, Daniel Deronda, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial life, Romola Stories: 'Brother Jacob', 'The Lifted Veil' Essays and reviews: 'Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt', 'How I came to write Fiction', 'Notes on Form in Art' Themes: animals, characterization, class, crime, gender, irony, melodrama, society, the woman question Other writers: Aristotle, Jane Austen, E. T. A. Hoffman, John Keats, William Shakespeare, Mary Wollstonecraft, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, George Sand, Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf Art and artists: illustrations, Rembrandt, J. M. W. Turner Music: Johann Sebastian Bach, Joseph Haydn Other contexts: feminism, education, politics, society, anti-Semitism, law, race, radicalism, technology, philosophy, utilitarianism, Christianity Publishing: John Chapman, TheCornhill Magazine, The Fortnightly Review, serialization Places: America, Berlin, Coventry, France, Ilfracombe, Munich, Oxford Reception and criticism: biographies of George Eliot, reputation In addition to A-Z entries, the book offers extra material: a useful classified contents list grouping headwords in thematic batches, a family tree, maps showing fictional settings and George Eliot's travels, a general bibliography, an alphabetical list of characters, and a time chart showing events in George Eliot's life in a historical and literary context.
In a landmark essay, Virginia Woolf rescued George Eliot from almost four decades of indifference and scorn when she wrote of the 'searching power and reflective richness' of Eliot's fiction. Novels such as Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss reflect Eliot's complex and sometimes contradictory ideas about society, the artist, the role of women, and the interplay of science and religion. In this book Tim Dolin examines Eliot's life and work and the social and intellectual contexts in which they developed. He also explores the variety of ways in which 'George Eliot' has been recontextualized for modern readers, tourists, cinema-goers, and television viewers. The book includes a chronology of Eliot's life and times, suggestions for further reading, websites, illustrations, and a comprehensive index.
In this Companion, leading scholars and critics address the work of the most celebrated and enduring novelists from the British Isles (excluding living writers): among them Defoe, Richardson, Sterne, Austen, Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot, Hardy, James, Lawrence, Joyce, and Woolf. The significance of each writer in their own time is explained, the relation of their work to that of predecessors and successors explored, and their most important novels analysed. These essays do not aim to create a canon in a prescriptive way, but taken together they describe a strong developing tradition of the writing of fictional prose over the past 300 years. This volume is a helpful guide for those studying and teaching the novel, and will allow readers to consider the significance of less familiar authors such as Henry Green and Elizabeth Bowen alongside those with a more established place in literary history.
A New Yorker writer revisits the seminal book of her youth--Middlemarch--and fashions a singular, involving story of how a passionate attachment to a great work of literature can shape our lives and help us to read our own histories. Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not. In this wise and revealing work of biography, reporting, and memoir, Rebecca Mead leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that deftly mirrors that of the novel, My Life in Middlemarch takes the themes of Eliot's masterpiece--the complexity of love, the meaning of marriage, the foundations of morality, and the drama of aspiration and failure--and brings them into our world. Offering both a fascinating reading of Eliot's biography and an exploration of the way aspects of Mead's life uncannily echo that of Eliot herself, My Life in Middlemarch is for every ardent lover of literature who cares about why we read books, and how they read us.
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.
