Middlemarch

Critical Approaches to the Novel

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• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781472514400
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781472513120
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This Anglo-American collection of essays on Middlemarch comprises a many-faceted study of a great and much-discussed novel. Written by scholars on both sides of the Atlantic who are linked by a close and concentrated interest in the novel, this group of complementary and interrelated studies is representative of its time, both in its range and in the way it looks back and ahead in methods and conclusions. It mixes formal analysis and doubts about formal analysis; studies of background and studies of foreground; and proffers examples of linguistic criticism of a relaxed and eclectic kind. Readers already familiar with Middlemarch will get much from the book, but it will be useful to both students and scholars of the novel form. Because Middlemarch is a novel of such range and profundity, a treasure-house of detail and a remarkable whole, a fine and subtle work of art and a creation of character and communities, it raises issues which touch off responses to most novels.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Structure of the Novel: Method, Metaphor and Mind
• 2 The Intellectual Background of the Novel: Casaubon and Lydgate
• 3 The Text of the Novel: A Study of the Proof
• 4 The Language of the Novel: The Character of Dorothea
• 5 The Language of the Novel: Imagery
• 6 Criticism of the Novel: Contemporary Reception
• 7 The Surface of the Novel: Chapter 30
• 8 A Plea for Ancient Lights
• Notes
• Index