George Eliot and the conflict of interpretations :
General Material Designation
[Book]
Other Title Information
a reading of the novels /
First Statement of Responsibility
David Carroll.
.PUBLICATION, DISTRIBUTION, ETC
Place of Publication, Distribution, etc.
New York :
Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.
Cambridge University Press,
Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.
1992.
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
Specific Material Designation and Extent of Item
xii, 333 pages ;
Dimensions
24 cm
INTERNAL BIBLIOGRAPHIES/INDEXES NOTE
Text of Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
CONTENTS NOTE
Text of Note
1. Scenes of Clerical Life: familiar types and symbols -- 2. Adam Bede: pastoral theodicies -- 3. The Mill on the Floss: growing up in St Ogg's -- 4. Silas Marner: rustic hermeneutics -- 5. Romola: duplicity, doubleness, and sacred rebellion -- 6. Felix Holt: commentaries on the apocalypse -- 7. Middlemarch: empiricist fables -- 8. Daniel Deronda: coercive types.
0
SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
Two versions of George Eliot, both very influential, have emerged from the study of her life and work. One is the radical Victorian thinker, formidably learned in a whole range of intellectual disciplines, to which she made major contributions during her early years in London. The other is the reclusive novelist, enigmatic, sybilline, celebrating through her fiction the communal values which were being eroded in the modern world. This study brings the two together, and by placing her within the crisis of belief and value acted out in the mid-nineteenth century, it reveals the unity of her whole career. George Eliot saw this crisis as one of interpretation, and the intensity of her writing comes from the vivid, almost apocalyptic, awareness that traditional modes of interpreting the world were breaking down irrevocably. This study shows how, in response to this, she redefined the nature of Victorian fiction--its presentation of character, the role of the narrator, the structure of narrative, the depiction of social and historical change. Each of her novels becomes an experiment which tests to the point of destruction a variety of Victorian myths, orthodoxies and ideologies, as it moves towards its climax--the inevitable contradiction which disconfirms all theories of life. George Eliot and the conflict of interpretations articulates the tension, novel by novel, between the writer's suspicion of orthodox creeds and her urgent need to restore values in a sceptical age. Each attempt to break through the conflict of interpretations acknowledges the urgency of the need and the provisional nature of any resolution.
PERSONAL NAME USED AS SUBJECT
Eliot, George,1819-1880-- Criticism and interpretation.
Eliot, George,1819-1880-- Critique et interprétation.
Andrae, A.
Eliot, George, 1819-1880
Eliot, George,1819-1880-- Criticism and interpretation.
Eliot, George,1819-1880.
Eliot, George.
TOPICAL NAME USED AS SUBJECT
Didactic fiction, English-- History and criticism.
Women and literature-- England-- History-- 19th century.