Discussion of Sea-Side Studies and Eliot's notebook entries, presented at 2008 Modern Language Association national convention, San Francisco, Dec. 27-30, 2008.
Moral philosophers have long observed that human beings strain to feel compassionate concern for people whose lives are distant from their own. Aristotle proposed in the Rhetoric that we tend to pity people who resemble us in age, character, habits,…
This short paper illustrates the way in which psychoanalytic perspectives can help us to understand the effect which a complex literary text like Daniel Deronda has on the reader. The two psychoanalytic perspectives used are Freud's insights into the…
In the scene describing Casaubon 's pathetic mental state prior to his heart attack in Chapter XXIX of Middlemarch, the narrator makes an enigmatic reference: 'Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask and the…
Water serves several major functions in Romola: it features prominently in the novel’s landscape, cataloguing the experiences of the characters, providing a backdrop encyclopaedia for their lives and tying the functional history and significance of…
Water serves several major functions in Romola: it features prominently in the novel’s landscape, cataloguing the experiences of the characters, providing a backdrop encyclopaedia for their lives and tying the functional history and significance of…
My dissertation begins with the central crisis of Jane Eyre, in which Jane flees Thornfield Hall after her failed marriage, is unable to find work, and almost dies of exposure and starvation on the moors. She finds herself asking "What was I to do?…
My title comes from a poem, 'A Minor Prophet’, written by George Eliot in 1865, and I want to enlist its help in showing in this paper how the failures she experienced during the decade following the publication of The Mill on the Floss turned into a…