Feeling Real in Middlemarch

Star, Summer J.

doi:10.1353/elh.2013.0030

Cited by 10 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 17 publications

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“…Summer Star calls this the 'becoming aware of oneself as a given being, in a given world, that is greater than one's individual conception'. 51 This produces 'a thrill of awe' in Eliot (JGE 342). 52 The same reactionawereappears in Eliot's account of her first visit to the Vatican Museum:…”

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%

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

Kuehn

2023

Literature & History

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Galvan¹

2018

Victorian Literature and Culture

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Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies and the Question of Postcolonial Modernism

Stasi¹

2015

Novel

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This essay takes up the relationship between modernism and postcolonialism through a comparison of Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim and Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies. What Conrad understands as a crisis in narrative form is, I argue, a function of his understanding of history as the absolute incompatibility of modernity and tradition, the West and the rest. This is best seen in his inability to narrate the story of those “unconscious pilgrims of an exacting belief” that occupy the absent center of his text, precisely those subjects who are the focus of Ghosh's story of a repurposed slave ship transporting a group of indentured servants to Mauritius. Incommensurability is thus the object of Ghosh's critique, part of the imperial ideology his text works to undermine through its development of a universal history that emerges out of its multiple narrative structure. Sea of Poppies represents less a return to modernism, then, than the development of a new form of realism, one produced through a dialectical overcoming of the particular understanding of history that undergirds one aspect of modernist aesthetic form.

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Feeling Real in Middlemarch

Cited by 10 publications

References 17 publications

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

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

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Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies and the Question of Postcolonial Modernism

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