An Erotics of Detachment: Middlemarch and Novel-Reading as Critical Practice

Kurnick, David

doi:10.1353/elh.2007.0025

Cited by 26 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Her problem is sexual, even without turning to the unresolvable issue of Casaubon's physical and marital adequacies: Kurnick sees Dorothea's erotically saturated coming-to-consciousness as a 'painful seduction or even a rape' by a 'thrusting' Rome. 70 Her 'confused ideas', 'ache' and 'electric shock' (M 181) are the result of a dislocating experience of time which causes a cognitive-affective break: in this 'city of visible history' (M 180) with all its monuments and art speaking of the glories and cost of Empire, divinity and human potential and achievement, her Bildung moves her from the 'past Dorothea', who had a naïve, ideal vision of herself as helpmate to an idealised researcher-husband, to a 'present Dorothea' who sees herself and Casaubon for what they really are, and what others already knew them to be, namely an incompatible pair.…”

Section: Middlemarchmentioning

confidence: 99%

George Eliot's Italian Roads: Mobility, Temporality and the Crises of Realism in Romola and Middlemarch

Kuehn

2023

Literature & History

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Critics have read Eliot's Romola (1862–3) and Middlemarch (1871–2) as historical novels, as examples of the female Bildungsroman or as oddities and successes, respectively, within Eliot's realist oeuvre. This essay brings these strands of enquiry together in a formalist analysis, suggesting that these must not be seen as separate but connected debates about time, space and Eliot's novelistic poetics. Using Bakhtin's idea of the meaning-making nature of the chronotope, the essay reads momentous ‘road’ scenes in Eliot's two novels. As I argue, the road chronotope does not just represent moments of crisis for the protagonists and is, thus, an agent of narrative and mental change, but it also creates the symbolic, generic and affective registers in which these two novels operate. The road chronotope reveals Eliot's self-conscious experimentation with realism as she grapples with history, the individual's place in the world, and also sympathy, which is central to both her novels and her realist poetics. On a broader scale, the essay thus participates in ongoing scholarly debates about nineteenth-century novelistic form while also acknowledging the current ‘mobilities turn’ in analyses of Victorian fiction.

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Section: Middlemarchmentioning

confidence: 99%