George Eliot Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

In spite of her apostasy, George Eliot still believed in the moral and spiritual values of Christianity and it is hardly surprising she should have used the metaphor of the horizon to refer to this ideal notion of the essence of Christianity since the horizon is both unreachable and yet always visible, showing the direction one ought to follow. Her characters’ moral odyssey is about learning to see beyond the limits of their own self-centered experience; however, as Lydgate underlines in Middlemarch, « a man’s mind must be continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an object-glass. » We shall therefore focus not only on George Eliot’s insistence on the necessity « to see beyond the horizon of mere selfishness » but also on the idea that a genuine moral horizon can only exist in her eyes if people develop the capacity to contemplate various horizons, not only the most distant ones but also those that are the closest to them so that they should not neglect the sufferings of individuals for the sake of abstract ideals. Sight and vision are clearly linked in George Eliot’s novels and so is the notion of sympathy since Lydgate compares the idea of the mind shrinking and expanding with that of « a systole and a diastole » thus implicitly referring to the beating of the heart.

In Adam Bede, George Eliot explores the way a society divides its members into categories and how these categories contribute to the formation of an individual’s identity. In the mid-nineteenth century authors in the naturalist tradition often discussed this dialogical relationship between individual and society, the specific roles for social gaze, the labeling and degrading. Eliot shows an acute of these labels that no one shapes identity without their influence. According to Nancy Anne Marck, Adam Bede introduces the theme of “emerging social consciousness” where the characters gain broader awareness of human interdependence through an experience of suffering (447). This is particularly evident when examining Eliot’s characters of “lesser fortune.” Once we’ve investigated how Eliot portrays these negative social forces throughout the novel, the labeling and the stigmatization, we will return to how Eliot addresses the larger question permeating her novel of education: how one judg...

- by Nora Bonner
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- British Literature, Sociology, Social Psychology, Philosophy
- by Silvia Silvestri
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- English Literature, Victorian Literature, Ekphrasis, George Eliot

(Grade - A / 85%)

(11/20/2017)

- by Alexander Surgenor
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- English Literature, Victorian Literature, George Eliot

While there is significant scholarship on George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and particularly on its proto-Zionist and proto-feminist ethos, no scholar has yet traced the central place of the Book of Esther in the novel. Moreover, none have noted the Book of Esther's significance as a central source text for her elucidation of both these themes. This thesis offers an extensive analysis of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda as a commentary on the Book of Esther, arguing that Eliot uses Esther’s story to respond to the “Jewish Question” as well as to reflect on attempts to redefine the position of women. By providing a close reading of relevant portions of the Book of Esther, and through detailed character analysis, I argue that Eliot makes use of the biblical story to imagine a solution to the “Jewish Question,” a Jewish return to Israel, and call into question the oppressive societal norms applied to women. Eliot’s Ezra Mordecai is an “enhanced” version of the Mordecai of the bible, fused with the biblical figure of Ezra to combat the antisemitism of late nineteenth century Britain through a Zion-centered nationalist vision. Eliot also casts Gwendolen in the mold of Vashti, borrowing from the unconventional gender roles of the Book of Esther to bring to life a fiercely independent, provocative, and yet tragic female figure who defies gender expectations. And like the Book of Esther itself, Eliot interweaves and compares the plight of women and the plight of Jews, particularly through her protagonist, Daniel. Daniel is Eliot’s Esther unbound, an orphan taken under Mordecai’s wing, possessing the sensitivities of a woman and yet transformed into a “new man” and a “new Jew” with the realization of his true ethnic and religious identity. Through Daniel, and through the female figures most central to his life and experience, Eliot calls for a change in both Jews’ and women’s status as the “other,” comparing their powerlessness and subjugation to the will of a dominant patriarchy and/or society, and articulating a need for the emancipation of both.

- by Channah Damatov
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- Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature, Feminism, George Eliot

Even after 150 years in print, George Eliot’s Middlemarch still abides as one of the most socially and psychologically perceptive works of the English literary canon. Eliot masterfully showcases her ability to see deep into her character’s thoughts and paradoxical motivations, evoking nuances and layers of flaw and grace that render each character delicately human. Her keen eye for detail and subtlety enable the reader to observe with greater perception than most people are able to see in their everyday lives. And with this aid, the reader may even learn to perceive with greater acuity the provincial characters that populate their daily experience. Chapter 33 of Middlemarch provides a keen example of Eliot’s powers of perception and description as it recounts a short but significant moment in the life of one of Eliot’s most perceptive characters: Mary. In this chapter, the reader observes in detail Mary’s ruminative personality at work, as she enjoys the company of her own percipient mind while seated by the fire during Mr. Featherstone’s last hours (314). But as Featherstone forces her into an impulsive choice to reject his command to burn the will, she finds herself by the end of the chapter doubting her powers of perception (318-19). Upon further exploration, this chapter in all its subtle detail and description seems to be one of the pivotal moments in Mary’s life, revealing her complex relationship with her own perspective of herself, others, and the course of things.

- by Nathan Johnson
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- English Literature, Victorian Studies, Literature, English language
- by Eike Kronshage
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- George Eliot, Paratexts, Daniel Deronda, Epigraphs

Presentación de George Eliot y otras autoras del siglo XIX y XX

- by ALEJANDRO ALAGÓN
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- George Eliot, Literatura inglesa
- by Jonah Siegel
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- Romanticism, Victorian Literature, History of Collections, George Eliot

In Romola (1862) George Eliot investigates the complex interplay between the female self and the surrounding cultural stifling milieu to explore the limitations and possibilities of femininity in Renaissance Florence. The author vests the eponymous heroine with an urgent desire to overthrow the socio-political structures founded on male patriarchal values, dominant in Florence and unfitting to accommodate women’s talents, thus echoing the debate about women’s place in mid-Victorian androcentric society. Romola’s aspiration to moral freedom, a vocation alternative to marriage and childbearing, and to an intellectual autonomy unmolested by a long-established patriarchal system, is crushed by the burden of family traditions, past obligations and social responsibilities. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to examine the evolution of the heroine’s character through her spiritual journey (which echoes Eliot’s own religious struggle) and to show her triumph over the egotism inherited fr...

- by Sandra Zodiaco
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- Women, Love, Desire, English Novel

Questo volume affronta la relazione tra metamorfosi del romanzo e testualità audiovisiva a partire dall’analisi di alcune tra le opere più rappresentative di quella che in ambito statunitense è stata definita Complex TV. Attraverso una critica dei finali di puntata e di serie, interpretati come indizi o sintomi di determinate caratteristiche stilistiche, Emanuela Piga Bruni individua la ripresa di temi di lunga durata e di tecniche narrative del romanzo classico in tre serie televisive di successo: Lost di J. J. Abrams, D. Lindelof, J. Lieber, C. Cuse (2004-2010), Mad Men di Matthew Weiner (2007-2015), Breaking Bad di Vince Gilligan (AMC, 2008-2013). L’autrice si interroga sulle ragioni all’origine della fortuna di queste opere: tra entrelacement e cliffhanger, intrecci vorticosi e interruzioni, contaminazioni dal cinema e delle arti visive, le serie TV contemporanee generano nuove suggestioni nell’immaginario collettivo capaci di coinvolgere un pubblico globale e transgenerazionale.

- by Emanuela Piga Bruni
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- George Eliot, Lost, Henry James, Honoré de Balzac

Moira Gatens is widely celebrated as a ground-breaking feminist theorist. More generally, she is a distinguished political philosopher, whose work on the imagination as a productive source of reasoned action and liberation—of active and ethical sociability—enjoys a fecund global influence. Drawing upon key aspects of her feminist and political philosophy, the purpose of this article is to outline, in general terms, the significance of the contribution Gatens additionally and correspondingly makes to Spinoza studies.

- by Simone Bignall
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- Political Philosophy, Ethics, Literature, Feminist Philosophy

The article uses the example of the European bildungsroman as represented paradigmatically in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795 – 96) to investigate the effects of reading. Goethe's text is sensitive to the embodied encounters that shape how we relate to the experience of reading, showing the forms of sensuous interaction in which literary reading has its roots. The model of reading presented in Goethe's text is contextualized with reference to debates about fiction circa 1800 but also to developmental psychology research into the emotional preconditions of an engagement with narrative and to recent discussions of the so-called paradox of fiction. To explore in more concrete terms the effect of reading Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, the article then turns to George Eliot's response in Daniel Deronda (1876). Goethe's novel appeals to the bodies of its characters and its readers. Eliot responds to this appeal by emphasizing that bodily reactions are themselves always shaped by history. However, it takes a certain sort of openness, which is learned more through interaction than through fiction, for characters and readers alike to confront the challenges and opportunities that an insight into the embodied nature of larger historical processes presents.

- by Ben Morgan
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- Embodied Cognition, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, George Eliot, Bildungsroman

George Eliot lived in a period marked by rapid changes and radical ideas. She had the opportunity to witness change and question the dogmas of her time during her transformation from a village girl to an educated woman, and through getting acquainted with the influential intellectuals of the nineteenth century. In time, she formed her own philosophy against the rigidly defined codes of Victorianism, and she came believe in the prominence of reality in life and art. Hence, reality became the perfect media for her to depict the true picture of individual in society. For Eliot, the individual is a problematic, self-deceptive being: he/she is inclined to form a fictitious image of himself/herself and fake social relations which result in self-deception and insincerity, and which distort the natural flow of life. The solution for this problem, Eliot thinks, is to encounter reality through a tragic experience which teaches and brings maturity to the individual and to life itself. In Adam Bede, George Eliot depicts four flawed, escapist characters: Adam, Dinah, Hetty, and Arthur are, in their own ways, self-deceptive, ego-centred figures. Having already formed second personality traits, they are neither true to themselves nor to the society do they live in. In the end these personality traits cause the emergence of tragedy and suffering after which their lives turn to normal. However, wisdom comes too late: it comes after experiencing tragedy.
Keywords: self-deception, family, parentification, individual, society, maturity

- by Emer Vaughn
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- Biopolitics, George Eliot, Capital Punishment in America, Capital Punishment

This essay argues that George Eliot utilizes a Blakean theory of knowledge in constructing the social web of Middlemarch, and that this web was Eliot's attempt to address the Victorian anxiety over defining both the general and particular elements of the human condition, as well as understanding individual perceptions of "reality." To support this claim, I will unpack what the Victorian anxiety was by introducing Matthew Arnold's "The Buried Life" and Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Pied Beauty" as representative pieces of what Victorians considered the general and particular aspects of the human condition to be. I will then briefly explain William Blake's theory of knowledge found within "The Clod and the Pebble;" examine Eliot's authorial intention behind using that particular poem in an epigraph to chapter twenty-five of Middlemarch; and I will finish by showing how Eliot's authorial intention is carried throughout her novel by all of the prominent characters, and that this intention closely resembles that of William Blake's.

- by Marcus Jones
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- Victorian Literature, George Eliot, William Blake, Middlemarch
- by nagen bhai
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- George Eliot, Middlemarch
- by Bud Marr
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- Victorian Literature, George Eliot
- by hatice yurttaş
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- George Eliot, Women's Writing (Literature)
- by tooba ahmed
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- George Eliot, Society, The Mill on the Floss, role of power
- by Anna Gutowska
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- The Romance Novel, Victorian Literature, George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
- by Fiona Panduri
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- English Literature, Victorian Studies, Literature, Victorian Literature

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, early Italian pictures were hung in English private homes and, later, in public galleries and exhibitions. The birth and growth of the interest in the Italian «Primitives» in the English world are illustrated in this paper through insights into the cultural and social scenarios of the time and through a review of the approaches of salient early English collectors. Such appreciation, destined to grow into an infatuation in the early twentieth century, is here monitored also through its reflections in British fiction in the works of, among others, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Edward Morgan Forster, Vernon Lee, David Herbert Lawrence.

- by Elisa Camporeale
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- Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Edward Morgan Forster, History of Collecting

George Eliot (1819-1880), famous British Victorian novelist, has illustrated many great fictions that one of them is The Mill on the Floss in which Maggie Tulliver, as the key character, lives in a family in which she has been discriminated against by her family members and even other people in the society because of the blackness of her eyes and hair, and her dark skin. People know her as an evil girl because of the blackness that she owns. But oppositely, Maggie tries to change their negative views to her by being kind and having good behavior. This paper has an analytic review on this character in this novel to explore her personality, behavior, and responsibility and the reactions of her family and other characters to Maggie.

- by Elaheh Soofastaei and +1
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- British Literature, Victorian Literature, George Eliot, Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- by Rebecca Salter
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- English Literature, Literature, Feminism, George Eliot

The title pretty much says it all...

- by Martin Willis
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- History of Medicine, George Eliot

Edited by Grażyna Bystydzieńska. British Studies Centre, University of Warsaw (2017).

- by Anna Gutowska
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- Victorian Literature, George Eliot, Victorian novel, The Mill on the Floss
- by Ceyhun Dikici
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- Victorian Literature, George Eliot, Female Bildungsroman, The Mill on the Floss
- by Julian Scutts
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- The Novel, Victorian Literature, Magical Realism, George Eliot
- by Yağmur Sönmez Demir
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- George Eliot, Victorian novel, Middlemarch

As the prelude to my dissertation entitled Mysticism and the Mind: Varieties of British and Irish Fiction, 1860 - 1940 and Beyond, this chapter articulates the link between the emerging use of the terms mysticism, consciousness, and subjectivity as they appear in narrative fiction beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. I speculate regarding how the use of these terms – collectively and singularly – undergoes a progressive shift beginning about the middle of the nineteenth century and continuing throughout the twentieth century; one that implies a greater distance from moral and/or religious significance and a
movement toward the propositions of mind science.

- by Dr. Colleen Pauza
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- Philosophy of Mind, James Joyce, Narrative, Theory of Mind

Addresses hair symbolism and Victorian conventions surrounding hair in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, which link Maggie to Medusa, Eve, and Gothic seductresses, among other things. The paper applies an autobiographical reading of Maggie Tulliver and considers the novel as an exercise in self-flagellation, albeit mitigated by the sympathy the reader is encouraged to feel for Maggie. An appendix looks at headgear (specifically bonnets) as fulfilling the same purposes as hair does in the novel.

- by Alexander C Gaya
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- British Literature, Gender Studies, English Literature, Gender and Sexuality
- by ali gujjar
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- George Eliot

Review Essay in Victorian Literature and Culture (2017) of books and articles, including among others: The Sky of Our Manufacture, by Jesse Oak Taylor; Green Victorians, by Vicky Albritton and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson; and Chaos and... more

- by Daniel Williams
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- British Literature, English Literature, Romanticism, Victorian Studies
- by Figgy Guvyer
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- English Literature, Feminist Theory, Literature, Narratology

In a dominantly male society women are underprivileged and restricted to the private sphere. Society’s expectations of womanhood generate a series of paradoxes which they have to face, namely that they are expected to be perfect and virtuous yet recognized as inherently inferior and potentially corrupt. The female self is seen as fluctuating between two extremes as either entirely good or entirely evil. The aim of this paper is to explore how women are perceived in the Victorian period through their representation in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil. It will be argued that Victorian society constructs the female self as the Other by constructing a variety of identities attributed to women in order to preserve male domination. Their literary representation reflects society’s multifaceted and at times paradoxical notion of womanhood.

- by Chrysa Titi
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- Women's Studies, Victorian Literature, George Eliot, Representation of Others
- by Timothy Chandler
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- European Studies, Aesthetics, Victorian Studies, Nineteenth Century Studies

Literature and Aesthetics 12 (2002): 83-91

- by Mark Byron
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- Victorian Literature, George Eliot, Victorian novel, Grand Tour

Neste pequeno ensaio, inserido na unidade curricular de Literatura Inglesa: sécs. XIX e XX, tentarei dar a compreender, partindo de conceções pessoais, por vezes, e por outras de elementos factuais, a obra-prima de George Eliot, tendo em... more

- by André Ribeiro
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- George Eliot, Literatura, Middlemarch, Literatura inglesa