Chapter Two: Preacher’s Vigil, Landlord’s Watch: Charity by the Clock in "Adam Bede"

The monograph by the Canadian scholar Marilyn Orr examines George Eliot’s oeuvre from the viewpoint of theopoetics. The author analyses the writer’s novels in chronological order, paying special attention to the problem of religious influence. The search of the form in the novel Adam Bede is interpreted as a search for ways to implement the writer’s own ideas, while Felix Holt, the Radicalis shown as an attempt to create a non-religious saint; in Middlemarch, the scholar continues, Eliot concentrated on depiction of a priest’s social role in a novel; finally, in Daniel Deronda we see an emphasized prevalence of the characters’ spiritual life over accuracy and truthfulness of narration, breaking the mold of realism. Orr’s methodology opens up new ways to look at the familiar classical texts, but it is not free of certain limitations (detailed examples provided in the review).

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George Eliot’s Promise of More

10.1093/oso/9780190845476.003.0005 ◽

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.

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