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 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…
George Eliot's commitment to teaching motivates her writing from the first. Like many of those whose thinking was shaped by early nineteenth-century evangelicalism, she saw education as a vital responsibility. In 1847, when she was twenty-eight years…
'I am sure you are right to leave everything grand and vague', George Eliot's publisher wrote bemusedly to her about Daniel Deronda's Zionism (Letters VI: 272). In his 'Conversation' on Daniel Deronda, Henry James too, like many contemporary and…
It is not just the famous Chapter 17, 'In Which the Story Pauses a Little', which makes George Eliot's Adam Bede one of the first candidates for any discussion of the tenets and aims of nineteenth-century literary realism. The question is opened in…
Written between January 1873 and June 1876, Daniel Deronda was George Eliot's final and most ambitious novel. The Jewish-born, later excommunicated Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, whose Ethics Eliot translated in 1856, would perhaps seem the more…