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.

“The German, the Sclave, and the Semite”

2014 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 513-541
Author(s):  
Tatiana Kuzmic
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Daniel Deronda ◽  
Time Period ◽  
The Creation

This essay contributes to George Eliot scholarship by examining the author’s interest in Eastern Europe, which spanned the length of her literary career, and its portrayal in her fiction. It situates Eliot’s Eastern European characters—from the minor ones, such as Countess Czerlaski’s late husband in “The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton” (1857), to major protagonists, such as Will Ladislaw of Middlemarch (1871–72)—in the context of England’s policy toward Poland vis-à-vis Russia during the course of the nineteenth century. The international political backdrop is especially useful in illuminating the Polish aspect of Middlemarch, whose publication date and the time period the novel covers (1829–32) happen to coincide with or shortly follow the two major insurrections Poland launched against Russia. Drawing on Eliot’s interactions with Slavic Jews in Germany, the essay shows how the creation of Will Ladislaw and his reprisal in the character of Herr Klesmer in Daniel Deronda (1876) serves the purposes of Eliot’s imagined cure for English insularity.

Novel Relations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alicia Mireles Christoff
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Object Relations ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Gender And Sexuality Studies ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Impact

This book engages twentieth-century post-Freudian British psychoanalysis in an unprecedented way: as literary theory. Placing the writing of figures like D. W. Winnicott, W. R. Bion, Michael and Enid Balint, Joan Riviere, Paula Heimann, and Betty Joseph in conversation with canonical Victorian fiction, the book reveals just how much object relations can teach us about how and why we read. These thinkers illustrate the ever-shifting impact our relations with others have on the psyche, and help us see how literary figures—characters, narrators, authors, and other readers—shape and structure us too. In the book, novels are charged relational fields. Closely reading novels by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, the book shows that traditional understandings of Victorian fiction change when we fully recognize the object relations of reading. It is not by chance that British psychoanalysis illuminates underappreciated aspects of Victorian fiction so vibrantly: Victorian novels shaped modern psychoanalytic theories of psyche and relationality—including the eclipsing of empire and race in the construction of subject. Relational reading opens up both Victorian fiction and psychoanalysis to wider political and postcolonial dimensions, while prompting a closer engagement with work in such areas as critical race theory and gender and sexuality studies. The book describes the impact of literary form on readers and on twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of the subject.

Who’s holding up the sky? On Rymba, a novel by A. Bushkovsky

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 150-158
Author(s):  
A. V. Zhuchkova
Keyword(s):  
Gender Politics ◽  
The State ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Flood Zone ◽  
The Social ◽  
Russian North ◽  
And Gender

The article deals with A. Bushkovsky’s novel Rymba that goes beyond the topics typical of Russian North prose. Rather than limiting himself to admiring nature and Russian character, the author portrays the northern Russian village of Rymba in the larger context of the country’s mentality, history, mythology, and gender politics. In the novel, myth clashes with reality, history with the present day, and an individual with the state. The critic draws a comparison between the novel and the traditions of village prose and Russian North prose. In particular, Bushkovsky’s Rymba is discussed alongside V. Rasputin’s Farewell to Matyora [ Proshchanie s Matyoroy ] and R. Senchin’s The Flood Zone [ Zona zatopleniya ]. The novel’s central question is: what keeps the Russian world afloat? Depicting the Christian faith as such a bulwark, Bushkovsky links atheism with the social and spiritual roles played by contemporary men and women. The critic argues, however, that the reliance on Christianity in the novel verges on an affectation. The book’s main symbol is a drowning hawk: it perishes despite people’s efforts to save it.

The Roman Aura in Henry James’s Daisy Miller: A Study (1878)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Carlos Rowe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Classical Culture

Concentrating on Henry James’s Daisy Miller, this chapter reveals its author engaging in arguments over the decline and fall of the Roman Empire among nineteenth-century Anglo-American writers and over the best means of using Rome’s example as a warning to contemporaries. The novella’s Roman setting and frequent references to classical culture both extend Anglo-American Romantics’ emphasis on the Roman failure to develop a comprehensive democracy and allow James to pursue his own interest in post-Civil War America as an emerging global power. Departing from earlier interpretations of Rome’s importance within Daisy Miller, this chapter argues that James employs the character of Daisy to reconceive Rome’s relevance to central issues of class and gender. If James rejects aspects of contemporary American feminism embodied by such classically inspired artists as Harriet Hosmer and Maria Louisa Lander, he nevertheless makes his unsophisticated heroine, Daisy, into a means of expressing his democratic vision.

Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century

2009 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Science And Literature ◽  
Creative Writers ◽  
Humphry Davy ◽  
The Individual ◽  
John Tyndall ◽  
Michael Faraday

‘It has been said by its opponents that science divorces itself from literature; but the statement, like so many others, arises from lack of knowledge.’ John Tyndall, 1874 Although we are used to thinking of science and the humanities as separate disciplines, in the nineteenth century that division was not recognized. As the scientist John Tyndall pointed out, not only were science and literature both striving to better 'man's estate', they shared a common language and cultural heritage. The same subjects occupied the writing of scientists and novelists: the quest for 'origins', the nature of the relation between society and the individual, and what it meant to be human. This anthology brings together a generous selection of scientific and literary material to explore the exchanges and interactions between them. Fed by a common imagination, scientists and creative writers alike used stories, imagery, style, and structure to convey their meaning, and to produce work of enduring power. The anthology includes writing by Charles Babbage, Charles Darwin, Sir Humphry Davy, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Michael Faraday, Thomas Malthus, Louis Pasteur, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Mark Twain and many others, and introductions and notes guide the reader through the topic's many strands. 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.

scholarly journals In the Wake of the Sexual Revolution: New Histories of Sexual and Gender Politics in Contemporary Australia

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-316
Author(s):  
Michelle Arrow ◽  
Isobelle Barrett Meyering ◽  
Sophie Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Gender Politics ◽  
Sexual Revolution ◽  
And Gender

A ‘LESS THAN ENTHUSIASTIC’ FRIENDSHIP: JOHN MORLEY, GEORGE ELIOT, AND GEORGE HENRY LEWES

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin A Morrison
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Middle Age ◽  
Belief System ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Critical Distance ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
Liberal Philosophy ◽  
Aesthetic Preferences

Abstract For roughly a decade, John Morley enjoyed a warm and deferential sociality with George Henry Lewes and George Eliot. The basis for their friendship was the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte, which initially held great appeal to Morley, who had lost his religious faith while studying as an undergraduate at Balliol, Oxford. While Lewes and Eliot’s views on Comte were largely fixed by middle age, Morley, still in his twenties, was searching for a substitute belief system. As Morley began to embrace the liberal philosophy of (and form a friendship with) John Stuart Mill, who had declared himself to be an antagonist of Comte’s, Morley, Lewes, and Eliot increasingly held less in common. This lack of commonality gave Morley the critical distance to reassess the couple both personally and intellectually. Embracing a new philosophy and divergent aesthetic preferences, Morley developed an equivocal view of his friends, roughly two decades his senior. Utilizing letters, diary entries, published writings, and a previously untranslated document in French, this essay provides a complex portrait of an intergenerational friendship among three nineteenth-century intellectuals.

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