The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot
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George Eliot and the Visual Arts
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The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot
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"This second edition appears just in time for the 2019 bicentenary of George Eliot's birth. It includes several new chapters, providing an essential introduction to all aspects of Eliot's life and writing. Accessible essays by some of the most distinguished scholars of Victorian literature provide lucid and often original insights into the work of one of the most important writers of the Nineteenth Century. From an introduction that traces her originality as a realist novelist, the book moves on to extensive considerations of each of Eliot's novels, of her and her publishing history. Chapters address the problems of money, philosophy, religion, politics, gender and science, as they are developed in her novels. With its supplementary materials, including a chronology and an extensive section of suggested readings, this Companion is an invaluable tool for scholars and students alike"-- Provided by publisher.
The Cambridge Introduction to George Eliot
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As the author of The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch, George Eliot was one of the most admired novelists of the Victorian period, and she remains a central figure in the literary canon today. She was the first woman to take on the kind of political and philosophical fiction that had previously been a male preserve, combining rigorous intellectual ideas with a sensitive understanding of human relationships and making her one of the most important writers of the nineteenth century. This innovative introduction provides students with the religious, political, scientific and cultural contexts they need to understand and appreciate her novels, stories, poetry and critical essays. Nancy Henry also traces the reception of her work to the present, surveying a range of critical and theoretical responses. Each novel is discussed in a separate section, making this the most comprehensive short introduction available to this important author.
George Eliot
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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.
George Eliot
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Mary Ann Evans, the British writer who worked under the male pen name George Eliot, was a fascinating literary figure and one of the most influential novelists of the Victorian period. This biography from Mathilde Blind delves into Eliot's life and work, presenting a compelling, well-rounded account.
George Eliot
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A great starting point for students seeking an introduction to George Eliot and the critical discussions surrounding her work.
George Eliot
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Since the publication of her first full length novel, Adam Bede, in 1859 George Eliot has enjoyed the reputation of the greatest realist novelist in English and as the guardian of traditional English values. But the way in which her works have been understood has changed dramatically in the light of shifting trends in literary criticism. In this new study, which draws on the findings of recent literary scholarship, Josephine McDonagh shows how Eliot needs to be recognized, not as an uncritical traditionalist, but as a writer who examined the processes of social and cultural change from the stand point of the progressive intellectual culture of her time. In her works, Eliot wove together issues and ideas taken from a broad range of contemporary fields – science, medicine, philosophy, and social theory. This study provides an accessible and informative analysis of Eliot's techniques as a realist writer in the context of the dynamic intellectual culture of mid-Victorian England.
George Eliot and the British Empire
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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 the Gothic Novel
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George Eliot and the Gothic Novel is the first monograph to systematically explore George Eliot's relationship to Gothic genres. It considers the ways in which the author's ethics link to sensational story-telling tropes. Reappraising the major works of fiction, this study compares passages of Eliot's writing with sequences from eighteenth and nineteenth-century Gothic works. Royce Mahawatte examines Eliot's deployment of, for example, the incarcerated heroine in Middlemarch, doppelgangers in Romola and vampiric queerness in Daniel Deronda. In doing so he lifts Eliot from the boundaries of social realism and places her within a broader and richer Victorian literary scene than has been previously considered.
George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance
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In this stimulating history of the ideas behind George Eliot's novels, Bernard Semmel explores Eliot's imaginative use of the theme of inheritance, as a metaphor for her political thinking. Through detailed analyses of Eliot's novels and other writings, and a study of the intellectual currents of the time, Semmel demonstrates how and why Eliot's views on inheritance provided central ideas for her fiction. Semmel uncovers Eliot's intent when she wrote of the obligations 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 burdens of the historical past, particularly those of the nation's culture and traditions. He believes Eliot's novels dwelt so insistently on the idea of inheritance in good part because she viewed herself as intellectually'disinherited,'writing as she did at a time when much of England was being transformed from a traditional community to an alienating modern society, and when, moreover, she suffered from a painful estrangement from her family. In this thought-provoking study, Semmel dissects the politics of Eliot's novels, including Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, Romola Felix Holt, and Adam Bede, and convincingly displays the relationship between Eliot's variations on the theme of inheritance and her acceptance of Britain's traditional policies of compromise and reform. All those interested in Victorian literature, history, and political thought will appreciate Semmel's George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance.
George Eliot in Context
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Prodigiously learned, alive to the massive social changes of her time, defiant of many Victorian orthodoxies, George Eliot has always challenged her readers. She is at once chronicler and analyst, novelist of nostalgia and monumental thinker. In her great novel Middlemarch she writes of'that tempting range of relevancies called the universe'. This volume identifies a range of'relevancies'that inform both her fictional and her non-fictional writings. The range and scale of her achievement are brought into focus by cogent essays on the many contexts - historical, intellectual, political, social, cultural - to her work. In addition there are discussions of her critical history and legacy, as well as of the material conditions of production and distribution of her novels and her journalism. The volume enables fuller understanding and appreciation, from a twenty-first-century standpoint, of the life and work of one of the nineteenth century's major writers.
Novels of George Eliot
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Barbara Hardy's Novels of George Eliot is a classic study of Eliot's outstanding powers as a great formal artist. The book's continuing appeal is due not simply to the perceptiveness and freshness of its writing but to the fact that form is interpreted in the widest sense to include whatever is relevant to the novels as organised, articulated, imaginative wholes and alss as the direct expression of George Eliot's profound analysis of the human condition.
Oxford Reader's Companion to George Eliot
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Adam Bede
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Our deeds carry their terrible consequences...consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves.'Pretty Hetty Sorrel is loved by the village carpenter Adam Bede, but her head is turned by the attentions of the fickle young squire, Arthur Donnithorne. His dalliance with the dairymaid has unforeseen consequences that affect the lives of many in their small rural community. First published in 1859, Adam Bede carried its readers back sixty years to the lush countryside of Eliot's native Warwickshire, and a time of impending change for England and the wider world. Eliot's powerful portrayal of the interaction of ordinary people brought a new social realism to the novel, in which humour and tragedy co-exist, and fellow-feeling is the mainstay of human relationships. Faith, in the figure of Methodist preacher Dinah Morris, offers redemption to all who are willing to embrace it. This new edition is based on the definitive Clarendon edition and Eliot's corrected text of 1861. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
The Lifted Veil: Brother Jacob
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`She had believed that my wild poet's passion for her would make me her slave; and that, being her slave, I should execute her will in all things.'The Lifted Veil was first published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1859. A dark fantasy woven from contemporary scientific interest in the physiology of the brain, mesmerism, phrenology and experiments in revification it is Eliot's anatomy of her own moral philsophy - the ideal of imaginative sympathy or the ability to see into others'minds and emotions. Narrated by an egoccentric, morbid young clairvoyant man whose fascination for Bertha Grant lies partly in her obliquity, the story also explores fiction's ability to offer insight into the self, as well as being a remarkable portrait of a misdeveloped artist whose visionary powers merely blight his life. The Lifted Veil is now one of the most widely read and critically discussed of Eliot's works. Published as a companion piece to The Lifted Veil, Brother Jacob is by contrast Eliot's literary homage to Thackeray, a satirical modern fable that draws telling parallels between eating and reading. Yet both stories reveal Eliot's deep engagement with the question of whether there are'necessary truths'independent of our perception of them and the boundaries of art and the self. Helen Small's introduction casts new light on works which fully deserve to be read alongside Eliot's novels. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Middlemarch
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Middlemarch's society is a complex web, and those who do not learn to navigate the intricate threads soon find themselves hopelessly entangled. In 1830s England, social status is no longer determined solely by birth, but by one's education, professional success, and choice of marriage partner. The inhabitants of Middlemarch must learn to reconcile their desires with society's expectations—or face the consequences. English author Mary Ann Evans used a male pseudonym—George Eliot—for her writing in an effort to combat the pervasive stereotypes that relegated female writers to frivolous, romantic subjects. Her novel challenged convention both in its unapologetic examination of political themes and in its scrutiny of daily life among the provincial middle class. First published in eight parts between 1871 and 1872, this is an unabridged version of Eliot's historical epic.
The Mill on the Floss
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Mary Ann Evans, better known by her pen-name of George Eliot, wrote this novel in 1860. This was one of Evans'most autobiographical novels, with Maggie Tulliver based on herself, Tom Tulliver based on her own older brother, and Mr. Tulliver based on her father
The Poetry of George Eliot
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Mary Anne Evans was born in 1819. Her Father did not consider her a great beauty and thought her chances of marriage were slim. He therefore invested in her education. By 1850 she had moved to London to work at the Westminster Review where she published many articles and essays. Her view on literature had taken some time to coalescence but with the publication of parts of “Scenes From A Clerical Life” in 1858 she knew she wanted to be a novelist and as her 1856 titled essay “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists'stated not a ‘silly woman's one at that. Success of course meant that her real name came out but it seemed not to affect how the public devoured her novels. Here, we look with a keen eye at her poetry. Although slim in number she is able to take a situation, scene or thought and bring us into its world with undeniable care.
