Antipodean George Eliot

Margaret Harris, Matthew Sussman, Margaret Harris, Matthew Sussman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000829792
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: Literature

In Middlemarch, George Eliot famously warns readers not to see themselves as the centre of their own world, which produces a 'flattering illusion of concentric arrangement'. The scholarly contributors to Antipodean George Eliot resist this form of centrism. Hailing from four continents and six countries, they consider Eliot from a variety of de-centred vantage points, exploring how the obscure and marginal in Eliot's life and work sheds surprising light on the central and familiar. With essays that span the full range of Eliot's career—from her early journalism, to her major novels, to eccentric late works such as Impressions of Theophrastus Such—Antipodean George Eliot is committed to challenging orthodoxies about Eliot's development as a writer, overturning received ideas about her moral and political thought, and unveiling new contexts for appreciating her unparalleled significance in nineteenth-century letters.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Texts and Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 George Eliot Elsewhere
• 2 Before Scenes of Clerical Life: Eliot’s 1854–57 Travelogues as Poetic Practice
• 3 George Eliot and ‘the Case of Wagner’: Fabrications and Speculations
• 4 The Mill on the Floss and the Novel in Bengal
• 5 A Roar of Sound: George Eliot on Sympathy and the Problem of Other Minds
• 6 Sympathy and Alterity: The Ethical Sublime in Romola
• 7 Reading the Riot Act: The Case of Felix Holt, the Radical
• 8 Middlemarch and Reform: Looking Back versus ‘The Thick of It’
• 9 The Grounds of Exception: Liberal Sympathy and Its Limits in Daniel Deronda and C.H. Pearson’s National Life and Character
• 10 Counter Impressions: Ambiguous Habits in Impressions of Theophrastus Such
• 11 Impressions of Theophrastus Such and the Limitations of Depth
• Works Cited
• Index