The Spanish Gypsy by George Eliot

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonie Gerard van den Broek
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
Spanish Gypsy

History’s Second-Hand Bookshop

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Lecourt
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
Daniel Deronda ◽  
The Past ◽  
Racial History ◽  
Spanish Gypsy

This chapter argues that George Eliot too conflated religion with race as a resource for secular individualism, but also that she thought more deeply about what consequences this move held for a major liberal keyword: reading. Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy (1868) and Daniel Deronda (1876) both stage a character’s recuperation of ethnic inheritance (Gypsy and Jewish, respectively) but only in Deronda does this recuperation successfully yield a many-sided individuality. This is because, as Eliot sees it, Judaism’s scriptural dimension allows one to fashion an idiosyncratic relationship to its racial history. Yet this valorization of scripture as the site at which one can personalize one’s relationship to tradition also runs up against Eliot’s long-standing wariness toward Protestant private interpretation—a fact that Deronda tries to get around by evaluating characters, not according to how well they interpret texts, but by how they relate to books as material metonyms of the past.

George Eliot

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Willis Cooke
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot

Judaism and Heterogeneity in the Modernist Long Novel

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-379
Author(s):  
Jeremy Tambling
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Carlos Fuentes ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Dreyfus Affair ◽  
Meaningful Category ◽  
Roberto Bolano

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.

The Language of Flowers in the Victorian Knowledge Age

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 136-160 ◽  
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.

George Eliot and the Eighteenth-Century Novel

1980 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 260-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Anne Doody
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
George Eliot
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