George Eliot’s Provincial Novels

The formal innovations in George Eliot’s late work Daniel Deronda transform the style and shape of the provincial novel, the genre she perfected in earlier works. These changes reflect a new way of thinking about mobility and space which derives from the conditions of late nineteenth-century imperialism and the ideology of ‘Greater Britain’. Emigration is central to this. The population of Britons settled in overseas colonies over the century by now constitutes a significant world-wide economic and political force. Concerted political and cultural efforts to consolidate this dispersed group were part of imperialist efforts to exert British domination across the globe. In the novel, white settler emigration is evident in the background, but the spotlight falls instead on Daniel’s Jewish emigration to Palestine. Developing a comparative method borrowed from contemporary historian Henry Maine, Eliot compares different styles of emigration, and in this strikingly anti-semitic work exposes the racism and oppressive power dynamics implicit in white settler ideology. Daniel Deronda’s complex engagement with Jewish theology transforms emigration into a reparative and utopian vision of world renewal. In the novel, Eliot revises formal components of her earlier provincial novels that relied on an underlying rhythm of movement and stasis, by introducing a new kinetic imaginary that emphasizes movement, exile, and dispersal. Eliot’s utopian vision, however, is short lived, and under pressure of the contradictions of a critique of imperialism that repeats many of its own structures, in her final work her formal innovations collapse into a series of mere character studies, and her political ideals slump into cynicism.

The Clock Finger at Nought

The epigraph of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda immediately raises questions of foundation: “the make-believe of a beginning” is both the make-believe that there is a beginning and the make-believe that constitutes a beginning. It is itself the foundation that eludes it; its fiat, self-grounding and groundless. That structure enacts the topography of Eliot’s realism, which seeks to comprise a world it can also never reach. Finding in the epigraph’s sidereal clock an image both for the novel’s temporal structure (repeatedly circling back to approach its own beginning from behind, it keeps deriving its own inception) and for the groundless positing of its narrative view, it suggests that one highly abstract way to render the drama of Daniel Deronda would be to say that it involves treating questions of foundation as perspectival ones. Perspective in George Eliot—crucial to sympathy, and to her ethics and her realism—appears at the beginning of Daniel Deronda to produce character (rather than the other way around). Many of the larger movements of the novel (its character system, its narrative structure, even, at moments, its syntax) enact the sweep of the epigraph’s sidereal clock and return one, repeatedly, to its initial, initiating paradoxes of inception.

Literary Transmigration George Eliot, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the Spirit of Transatlantic Exchange

Reading several letters from the eleven-year correspondence alongside Dred and Daniel Deronda, this paper argues that the model of transatlantic spiritual communication presented by Stowe and Eliot’s epistolary friendship takes on a new and potentially radical light when applied to the concept of a transnational and post racial spiritual community. Each text fundamentally challenges the ability of the realist novel to depict a nuanced understanding of racial identity through the use of spiritualist and religious discourse and imagery.

Normal People: Kudos to Vulnerability, A Tribute to Friendship

This paper intends to undergo a comparative study on George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) and Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018). The nature friendships the characters display in the aforementioned novels are of various attributes. Principles of religious, economical, racial, and societal heritage come together to delineate the relationship the four characters experience and brandish. The theme of power struggle in interpersonal relationships and the related parameters in play will be discussed through the ideas of Michelle Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, Frank Lovett, Jacques Derrida, and Aristotle. Among the defining factors to be tended to, vulnerability, the element of time –futurity-, death, and the approach towards “the other” are dominant. An almost two century-interval between the two literary works has marked a tremendous difference in the attitude of the protagonists towards friendship and conversion. The paper attempts to explore the inevitable factors, defining a friendship, the constituents empowering it along with those reducing it to an entity of its own negation.