George Eliot’s Anachronistic Literacies

2019 ◽  
pp. 108-136
Author(s):  
Mary L. Mullen
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
Path Dependency ◽  
Central Figure ◽  
The Past ◽  
Adam Bede ◽  
Mill On The Floss

This chapter focuses on narrative metalepsis in the novels of George Eliot, the most central figure in studies of Victorian realism and often the standard through which Irish novelists are deemed not realist enough. But William Carleton’s and Charles Kickham’s ethnographic realism allows us to understand Eliot’s provincial realism in a new way: as divided rather than integrative. In novels that encourage institutional consolidation, Eliot uses narrative metalepsis to question modern institutionalism’s drive toward futurity. Adam Bede (1859) and The Mill on the Floss (1860) produce a form of anachronistic literacy—a mode of reading and remembering that collapses historical distance as it celebrates the immediacy of the past—to question women’s fraught relationship to modern institutionalism. Eliot’s embrace of anachronism is surprising because her novels seem to produce a form of historicism grounded in path-dependency: in her novels, past choices tend to constrain present decisions. But, in novels that otherwise confirm the existing path, Eliot’s anachronistic literacy creates radical ruptures that mobilise anachronisms to imagine otherwise.

Illiberalism and the Exception in George Eliot's Early Writing

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 377-407
Author(s):  
Neal Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
First Century ◽  
Early Writing ◽  
The Public ◽  
Adam Bede ◽  
Mill On The Floss ◽  
The Public Sphere

Over the past two decades, studies of the Victorian novel have been enriched significantly by a growing body of scholarship looking to the literature and letters of the period to affirm for the twenty-first century the theoretical and practical value of liberal conceptualizations of critical detachment and communicative decision-making procedures. In the process, the works of George Eliot (1819–1880) have come to be understood not only as modeling forms of critical detachment and rational decision-making but also as important contributors to what Amanda Anderson has identified as “the emergence of the [Habermasian] public sphere in Enlightenment Europe, a historical condition in which critique, argument, and debate inform developing political practices and institutions,” which “helped to consolidate … the legitimating force of public opinion and the rule of law, the successor to now delegitimated forms of absolute sovereignty.” However, I will argue here that Eliot's early writing in particular demonstrates a distinct lack of faith in the power of liberalism and its political procedures and that Eliot's early work in fact exposes the illiberal tendencies embedded in these procedures. Rather than asserting the authority of the public sphere, Eliot's important early novelsAdam Bede(1859) andThe Mill on the Floss(1860) consistently look beyond themselves, so to speak, to a providential authority that exceeds the tenets of realism in their efforts to resolve conflict and provide closure to the novels. For each novel, aesthetic coherence is secured not through “critique, argument, and debate” but through recourse to metaphysics and to extrasocial and/or extraprocedural decisions. In the following pages I align this phenomenon in Eliot's early writing with the controversial German legal scholar Carl Schmitt's concept of the exception in order to argue that, by appealing to the logic of providence to resolve their most intractable legal and ethical problems, these early novels in fact demonstrate Eliot's awareness of the practical limitations of proceduralism as a legitimate decision-making instrument.

Envious Reading: Margaret Oliphant on George Eliot

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-111
Author(s):  
Elsie B. Michie
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Margaret Oliphant ◽  
The Past ◽  
Contemporary Life ◽  
Mill On The Floss ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Ebb And Flow

Elsie B. Michie, “Envious Reading: Margaret Oliphant on George Eliot” (pp. 87–111) This essay maps out a model of influence that is not deterministic but instead addresses historical “conditions,” the proximity of authors’ lives to their work, the relationship among texts, and how we read (or fail to read) all those interactions. Using the work of Sianne Ngai and other theoreticians of envy, it presents envy as a productive emotion that drives authors to contemplate the circumstances that make their lives and writing both similar to and different from those of their rivals. It tracks the workings of envy through Margaret Oliphant’s relation to George Eliot, arguing that in the novel Hester: A Story of Contemporary Life (1883) Oliphant created a story centered on envy in order to work through her relation to her more powerful and famous precursor. Depicting two hostile women, who are gradually brought close by being forced to understand each other’s circumstances, Oliphant also used Hester to rework the Eliot novel she loved best, The Mill on the Floss (1860), such that it reflected the circumstances of her own life as much as Eliot’s. Oliphant’s envious reading of Eliot reconfigures the relation between authors, between texts, between lives and works, between readers and what they read. Replacing the linear, generational conception of influence as indebtedness with an image of circumstances that ebb and flow, envious reading opens up a space of creative flux and contingency that points to the present and future as much as to the past.

George Eliot’s Promise of More

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Auyoung
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Adam Bede ◽  
Mill On The Floss ◽  
Literary Description ◽  
The Aesthetic

This chapter recovers the aesthetic significance of a reader’s mediated relation to the objects and experiences represented in realist fiction. When George Eliot’s intrusive narrators in Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Middlemarch cue readers to form impressions that are as distinct as possible, they expose the indeterminacy that persists in the most concrete passages of literary description, alerting us to the limits of how much we can ever know about a fictional world. By drawing on the aesthetics of indeterminacy advanced by Edmund Burke, this chapter reveals that Eliot’s commitment to narratives of disillusionment exists in tension with a surprisingly Romantic aversion to finitude, and that literary realism enchants ordinary things by freeing them from the solidity and determinacy they possess in everyday life.

scholarly journals A Broadening of Prospects: Female Progression in Austen and Eliot

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lydia Verschaffelt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Development ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
National Importance ◽  
Mill On The Floss ◽  
Childhood Home ◽  
Landed Gentry

<p>Austen and Eliot register the turbulence and transformation of their respective historic moments in the portrayal of a young heroine on the cusp of adulthood with a number of potential paths ahead of her. The heroines, like their societies, are caught between old and new as they seek to acknowledge the ties that bind them to the past and simultaneously create a future of their own. This dilemma reveals the nineteenth-century novel’s concerns of the individual’s ability to grow while being enmeshed in a network of relationships, and the place of the past in an increasingly unstable future.  Beginning with Emma (1815) and The Mill on the Floss (1860), and concluding with a comparison of Persuasion (1817) and Middlemarch (1871), this thesis tracks Austen and Eliot’s depiction of female development which moves from a focus on the centrality of the childhood home, and in particular the heroine’s relationship with her father, to a narrative which ends on a more conscious note of ambiguity and broadening prospects. Emma and Mill both depict heroines who find their future in their past. Emma and Maggie develop and assert their own agency, but their circumstances and experiences of childhood bind them to their site of origin.  Conversely, both Austen and Eliot’s later works enact a deliberate loosening of the hold the heroine’s childhood has on her, and Anne and Dorothea end up in very different places to where they began. They both reject their position as part of the rural landed gentry to instead gain entry into a more dynamic and inclusive community. This personal transition is accompanied by a more explicit delineation of the evolving socio-political landscape, an increase in the heroine’s mobility and fluidity, and an ending that frustrates a sense of stable closure in preference for one of more open possibility. Thus, so far from being read simply as ‘marriage plots’ Austen and Eliot subversively depict the young woman’s changing position and prospects as a matter of national importance.</p>

Sympathy or Religion? George Eliot and Christian Conversion

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 360-387
Author(s):  
Ilana M. Blumberg
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
Christian Ethics ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Christian Conversion ◽  
Mill On The Floss

Ilana M. Blumberg, “Sympathy or Religion? George Eliot and Christian Conversion” (pp. 360–387) This essay argues that a postsecular moment requires our return to George Eliot to consider anew the relations between religion and secularity. Looking at her early works, in particular “Janet’s Repentance” (1857) and The Mill on the Floss (1860), I suggest that Eliot offers us a counterintuitive narrative in which her heroines’ ethical transformation coincides with a conversion to Christianity rather than a move away from it. Rather than imagining a thoroughly Christian England revitalized by its turn to humanist religion, Eliot depicts a nominally Christian England, attached to hollow forms and mere custom, in need of conversion to an ardent faith. In these novels, evangelicalism, for all its flaws, functions as the vessel for such conversion when human beings’ own agency fails. I suggest here that what we have construed as sympathy over recent decades of critical reading may be more intelligible if we read it as grace, thus leaving us to reassess the extent to which major mid-Victorian intellectuals sought to conceive a post-Christian ethics.

“I Know I Can’t Change the Future, But I Can Change the Past”: Toni Morrison, Robin Coste Lewis, and the Classical Tradition

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-356
Author(s):  
Grace McGowan
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Classical Tradition ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Central Figure ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Generation

Abstract “A central figure in transnational intellectual history” (Roynon, 2013), Toni Morrison’s oeuvre has helped deconstruct the triangulated relationship between a European Graeco-Roman classical tradition, Africa, and America. Morrison’s deconstruction of the classical past and its aesthetics have laid the foundation for the reconstructive work of a new generation of writers, including Robin Coste Lewis. Both writers renegotiate and reclaim a classical aesthetic by recovering its African roots and situating it in an African American context. In addition, the article (1) examines the role of a classical aesthetic in beauty discourse and Robin Coste Lewis’s re-vision of the black female body and (2) addresses what this means for canonicity, linking Lewis’s ambivalence about reclaiming a classical aesthetic to Morrison’s ambivalence in “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” (1987).

Infanticide in Adam Bede: Hetty Sorrel and the Language of Justice

Pólemos ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-263
Author(s):  
Francesca D’Alfonso
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
Fallen Woman ◽  
Adam Bede ◽  
The Way

Abstract Starting from an analysis of realism as expressed by George Eliot in Chapter 17 of Adam Bede, this paper intends to investigate the way in which law is enforced in a case of infanticide. In particular, in Eliot’s novel the crime is committed by the beautiful and naive Hetty Sorrel whose tragic destiny is a consequence of her seduction by the aristocratic Arthur Donnithorne. Hence her condition of a fallen woman and, accordingly, the trial culminating in the sentencing to hanging. Significantly, Hetty’s silence before the jury in the courtroom is interrupted thanks to the intervention of Dinah Morris, her Methodist cousin who, meeting the prisoner in solidarity and sympathy, will have from her a full confession of the events.

The Multi-life Stories of Gautama Buddha and Vardhamana Mahavira

2012 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Appleton
Keyword(s):  
Life Stories ◽  
Central Figure ◽  
The Past ◽  
Do So

Like Buddhist traditions, Jain traditions preserve many stories about people’s past lives. Unlike Buddhist traditions, relatively few of these stories narrate the past lives of the tradition’s central figure, the jina. In Jainism there is no equivalent path to the bodhisatt(v)a path; the karma that guarantees jinahood is bound a mere two births before that attainment, and the person who attracts that karma cannot do so willfully, nor is he aware of it being bound. There is therefore no Jain equivalent to the ubiquitous j?taka literature. In this paper I will explore what the absence of a j?taka genre in Jain traditions tells us about the genre’s role in Buddhism. Focusing upon the multi-life stories of Gautama Buddha and Vardham?na Mah?v?ra, I will ask how these two strikingly similar narratives betray some fundamental differences between Buddhist and Jain understandings of the ultimate religious goal and the method of its attainment.

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