Imagination, Religion, and Morality: What Did George Eliot Learn from Spinoza and Feuerbach?

This paper explores how Judaism is represented in non-Jewish writers of the nineteenth-century (outstandingly, Walter Scott and George Eliot) and in modernist long novels, such as those by Dorothy Richardson, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Alfred Döblin, Robert Musil, and Thomas Mann, and, in the Latin American novel, Carlos Fuentes and Roberto Bolaño. It finds a relationship between the length of the ‘long’ novel, as a meaningful category in itself (not to be absorbed into other modernist narratives), and the interest that these novels have in Judaism, and in anti-semitism (e.g. in the Dreyfus affair) as something which cannot be easily assimilated into the narratives which the writers mentioned are interested in. The paper investigates the implications of this claim for reading these texts.

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George Eliot and Italy: Literary, Cultural and Political Influences from Dante to the Risorgimento. By Andrew Thompson. Basingstoke/New York: Macmillan/St Martin's, 1998. Hb. £42.50.

Translation and Literature ◽

10.3366/tal.1999.8.part_2.266 ◽

1999 ◽

Vol 8 (Part_2) ◽

pp. 266-269

Author(s):

Nicola Trott

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

George Eliot ◽

Political Influences

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The Language of Flowers in the Victorian Knowledge Age

Victoriographies ◽

10.3366/vic.2013.0129 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 3 (2) ◽

pp. 136-160 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Molly Engelhardt

Keyword(s):

Material Culture ◽

George Eliot ◽

Charlotte Bronte ◽

Elizabeth Gaskell ◽

Romantic Love ◽

Narrative Fiction ◽

Knowledge Age

The language of flowers is typically dismissed as a subgenre of botany books that, while popular, had little if any influence on the material culture of Victorian life. This article challenges this assumption by situating the genre within the context of the professionalisation of botany at mid-century to show how efforts to change attitudes towards botany from a fashionable pastime for the gentler sex to a utilitarian practice in service of humanity contributed to the revitalisation and popularity of the language of flowers. While scientific botanists sought to know flowers physiologically and morphologically in the spirit of progress and truth, practitioners of the language of flowers – written primarily for and by women – celebrated uncertainty and relied on floral codes to curtail knowing in order to extend the realm of play. The struggle for floral authority was centred in botanical discourses – both scientific and amateur – but extended as well into narrative fiction. Turning to works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, I show how Victorian writers expected a certain degree of floral literacy from their readers and used floral codes strategically in their fiction as subtexts for practitioners of the language of flowers. These three writers, I argue, took a stand in the gender struggle over floral authority by creating scientific botanists who are so obsessed with dissecting plants to reveal their secrets and know their ‘life truths’ that they become farsighted in matters of romantic love and unable to read the most obvious and surface of floral codes. The consequences of the dismissal of the superficial are in some cases quite disastrous.

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