Labours of a Modern Storyteller: George Eliot and the Cultural Project of ‘Nationhood’ in Daniel Deronda

1996 ◽  
pp. 25-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Lesjak
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
Daniel Deronda ◽  
Cultural Project

Inherited Emotions: George Eliot and the Politics of Heirlooms

2010 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 465-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Dunagan Osborne
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Development ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
Daniel Deronda ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
And Gender

Katherine Dunagan Osborne, "Inherited Emotions: George Eliot and the Politics of Heirlooms" (pp. 465––493) This essay removes George Eliot's heroines from heterosexual dyads to focus on the roles that things play in women's autonomous moral and sexual development. Because Eliot's female protagonists can adapt heirlooms for their own private and emotional purposes, they can replace traditional inheritance based on bloodlines with a non-familial, emotional inheritance, thus illustrating the subtlety of Eliot's family and gender politics. This reading of Eliot contextualizes specific heirlooms in Middlemarch (1871––72) and Daniel Deronda (1876)——including miniature portraits, emeralds, turquoises, and diamonds——to reveal the surprising politics embedded in Eliot's heirlooms that her nineteenth-century readers would certainly have recognized.

CONVENIENT COSMOPOLITANISM:DANIEL DERONDA, NATIONALISM, AND THE CRITICS

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 593-614
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Stević
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Private Sphere ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ethnic Nationalism ◽  
Daniel Deronda ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Radical Shift

The specter of cosmopolitanismhauntsDaniel Deronda. In a curious reversal of critical fortune, the novel condemned by many of its initial reviewers for dabbling into obscure mystical doctrines and for pontificating far too explicitly about the significance of narrow loyalties and local attachments has recently come to embody a scrupulous investigation of cosmopolitan ethics. The sources of this radical shift in the understanding ofDaniel Deronda’s politics are theoretical as much as they are interpretative. For some time now, humanistic scholarship has been simultaneously attracted to cosmopolitanism and embarrassed by it: while we continue to be drawn to cosmopolitanism as an ideological project invested in overcoming tribal loyalties and in celebrating the encounter with the other, we are also resistant to its universalizing logic which we often see as complicit with the hegemonic tendencies variously present in the intellectual legacy of the European Enlightenment and in contemporary global capitalism. Faced with this tension, several influential scholars –– most notably Amanda Anderson and Kwame Anthony Appiah –– have turned toDaniel Derondaas an example of a cosmopolitanism free of pernicious hegemonic connotations, a cosmopolitanism understood as a commitment to open exchange between nations and races, rather than as the erasure of all cultural difference. In doing so they have, however, simultaneously overextended the concept of cosmopolitanism, rendering it very nearly meaningless, and misjudged the politics of Eliot's novel, overlooking its deep commitment to the logic of ethnic nationalism. In this essay I wish to use what I take to be the dual failure — interpretative and theoretical — of recent readings ofDaniel Derondain order to reexamine both the politics of Eliot's late writings and the ways in which we use the concept of cosmopolitanism in our critical practice. I will argue, first, that thecosmopolitan Deronda, constructed in a series of influential interpretations over the past two decades, is a specter, an apparition. This phantom, as we shall see, was constructed due to an unusual alignment between the desire to dissociate the great Victorian moralist that was George Eliot from the charge of slipping into narrow nationalist worldview and the desire to recuperate a non-hegemonic vision of cosmopolitanism. Second, I will argue that the novel's much discussed marginalization of Gwendolen Harleth in favor of Daniel Deronda's nationalist mission does not constitute simply a rejection of an egotistical heroine in the name of higher duties, but rather a decisive moment in Eliot's late career and in the history of Victorian fiction: by unequivocally favoring the hero's nationalist commitments over the heroine's private struggles, George Eliot has also rejected the private sphere which has traditionally preoccupied nineteenth-century fiction, in favor of the fantasies of collective destiny. Before analyzing the full implications of this shift, however, I will outline in more detail the interpretative history in which this essay intervenes.

History’s Second-Hand Bookshop

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Lecourt
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
Daniel Deronda ◽  
The Past ◽  
Racial History ◽  
Spanish Gypsy

This chapter argues that George Eliot too conflated religion with race as a resource for secular individualism, but also that she thought more deeply about what consequences this move held for a major liberal keyword: reading. Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy (1868) and Daniel Deronda (1876) both stage a character’s recuperation of ethnic inheritance (Gypsy and Jewish, respectively) but only in Deronda does this recuperation successfully yield a many-sided individuality. This is because, as Eliot sees it, Judaism’s scriptural dimension allows one to fashion an idiosyncratic relationship to its racial history. Yet this valorization of scripture as the site at which one can personalize one’s relationship to tradition also runs up against Eliot’s long-standing wariness toward Protestant private interpretation—a fact that Deronda tries to get around by evaluating characters, not according to how well they interpret texts, but by how they relate to books as material metonyms of the past.

scholarly journals GRANDCOURT IN GEORGE ELIOT’S ‘DANIEL DERONDA’ AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 117-127
Author(s):  
Boris M. Proskurnin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Arthur Schopenhauer ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Daniel Deronda ◽  
The World ◽  
Main Notion ◽  
Central Characters ◽  
First Time

For the first time in Russian studies of George Eliot, one of the central characters of her only novel about contemporary English life, Daniel Deronda, is under analysis. The character of Grandcourt is looked at as the writer’s distinctive reflection on her reading and comprehension of Arthur Schopenhauer’s book Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1818). The author of the essay gives the facts of the very serious, profound and critical reading of this book by George Eliot. The essay shows in what ways this kind of reading influences the ideological and artistic structures of the novel. It is specially demonstrated how George Eliot’s thorough knowing of Schopenhauer’s book and the thoughts this knowing generates reflects on the image of Grandcourt. It is stressed in the article that the character of Grandcourt is not simply to illustrate some passages of the philosophical system of the German thinker. It is argued that Schopenhauer’s concepts of Man, his role and place in the world cause George Eliot’s deep ontological thinking of human existence and its meaning; the German philosopher’s speculations lead Eliot to the indirect dialogue and dispute with Schopenhauer as it happens in some works by Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy and other authors of the end of the 19th – beginning of the 20th centuries. The author of the article demonstrates artistic principles and means with the help of which George Eliot reconsiders the main notion of Schopenhauer’s system – Wille (Will), which transforms into rampage of subjectivity, unrestrained egoism and egotism, despotism, aggression, disdain of Other, moral violence and rapture of it, rejection of common sense and practical logic, the triumph of ‘nature’, seen merely as an instinct, deletion of such notions as self-analysis and self-criticism, human sympathy, compassion, friendship, love to others. Some special emphasis is put on Eliot’s arguing against Schopenhauer’s gender anthropology. It is stressed in the article that, parallel to ontological disagreement and with the help of this polemics, Eliot through the image of Grandcourt both ironically and dramatically sharpens some moral ill-being of contemporary English high society.

scholarly journals THE NATIONAL “OTHER” IN “DANIEL DERONDA” BY GEORGE ELIOT

2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 168-175
Author(s):  
Boris Mikhailovich Proskurnin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
Daniel Deronda
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