<i>Romola</i>: Historical Narration and the Communicative Dynamics of Modernity

Thomas, David Wayne

doi:10.1002/9781118542347.ch9

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 6 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…He arranges Romola's servant's return to Florence while chastising Romola for a flight he calls proud and selfish. What follows is a clash between characters and their gendered and religious-ideological world views, 27 but also between historical epochs. Savonarola's chauvinism, masculine and religious power meet Romola's proto-feminist righteousness and desire for individual freedom and selfdetermination.…”

Section: Romolamentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Kuehn

2023

Literature & History

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Section: Romolamentioning

confidence: 99%