The English Historical Novel

Fleishman, Avrom

doi:10.56021/9780801811883

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…31 As the novel reveals contradictions across temporal, cultural and genre modalities, Avrom Fleishman sees a related narrative issue in Romola, namely the absence of 'needful relations' between characters, on the one hand, and characters and the novel's setting, on the other. 32 While there are meaningful relations between charactersin the way that Savonarola is significant here for Romola's educational process as he shifts her from what he considers her pagan selfishness and self-absorption to an otherdirected charity which he motivates through his Christian faith and mission -Fleishman suggests that 'there is nothing in the main movement of the plot […] that could not be situated in another time and place'. 33 Ann Ronald hints at the same issue when she diagnoses a certain lifelessness in the novel, despite Eliot's geographically and historically 'accurate' depictions of Renaissance Florence: scenes 'never come alive, they freeze', as characters also 'never act [but] pose'.…”

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%