So many critics have pointed to George Eliot as a symbol of the nineteenth century's religious flux that the idea is becoming a commonplace one. House, for example, in "Qualities of George Eliot's Unbelief", concedes that Eliot is not a typical Victorian, "Yet her history her intellectual and spiritual and moral history -- exemplifies so many trends and qualities of Victorian thought that she deserves to be considered alone." [...]

Fictional characters who mistake reality for fiction can be considered as parodies, beings invented by the author to denounce the illusions of which they are victims. But this viewpoint is not valid if the novels in which those "mistaken readers" exist suggest, to the contrary, that reality is problematic; it is therefore impossible to judge the characters without "afterthoughts", since these characters, in a way, are pointing to the fact that the reality they live in is "unreal". / Such is the case with Madame Bovary and Don Quijote. These two novels, as a result of different "techniques", essentially tell their readers to be suspicious about what is "true" and what is "false". These are novels without a strong authorial voice, novels that speak more about how characters conceive reality than about reality itself, which remains in both cases a complete mystery. / This viewpoint can be extended into a definition of the novel, in terms of what it says (or doesn't say) about the world. And in fact, a novel doesn't say anything about the world, at least not directly. It could be described as "a machine" made from what the characters say. Obviously, such a machine cannot be taken too seriously, since nobody (that is to say no real person) is actually saying what is being said in its pages. But at the same time, by refusing to show the fictional world in itself, (by always showing it through the eyes of fictional characters), the novelist reminds his reader that the real world itself is inescapably ambiguous.

The selected letters of George Ripley, 1828-1841, constitute an important source of information about New England Transcendentalism and its literary, philosophical, and political manifestations. These 36 letters from 1828 to 1841 chronicle Ripley's integral involvement in the most significant achievements of the Transcendentalists, translation of European literature, the various controversies with the Unitarian establishment, the formation of the Transcendental Club, and participation in the many reform movements of the period. Specifically, these letters detail Ripley's career as minister of Boston's Purchase Street Church, his missionary work for the American Unitarian Association, the production of his Specimens of Standard Foreign Literature, his relationships with many of the leading Transcendentalists, and his founding the experimental community, Brook Farm.Ripley's letters are presented here in fully edited form. Transcriptions were produced from photocopies of the original manuscripts, creating a genetic text which retains, as much as possible, the exact form of the handwritten letter. Each letter is fully annotated, and an index topeople, publications, and important ideas is provided. An extensive introductory essay outlines important events in Ripley's life and discusses the contribution the letters make both to an understanding of Ripley and to an important period in American letters. / Department of English

I was interested in history while I was in school and I pursued this interest as a history student at the University of Tabriz where I graduated in history in 1973. Apart from a major part of our studies in history, which were about the Iranian and foreign dynasties, we had to study a great deal about the lives of individual Kings; but hardly any space was allocated to the history of social and political movements in Iran. The names of patriots and political thinkers such as K̲h̲iyābānī were not, for political reasons, mentioned. These movements, however, no matter how briefly they were covered in our history books, were still able to arouse my curiosity and interest in discovering more about these movements and their leaders. In 1977 I decided to undertake research in modern history. My decision coincided with social and political upheavals in Iran which resulted in the revolution of 1979. This by itself strengthened my conviction that we must study and understand our history in its particular social and political content. That is to say revolts and revolutions are not something which appear suddenly, but are the product and result of historical developments in which peoples, as a living force, have taken part. These revolts and revolutions are, in fact, the manifestations of longstanding social injustices and oppressions which have been imposed on the people by despotic kings, irresponsible governments and reactionary rulers. In recent social upheavals of Iran I witnessed how thousands of sincere people and patriots gave their lives and wished to free their country from age old backwardness. This reflected the continuation of the constitutional revolution and K̲h̲iyābānī's uprising (1910-1920). Since my grandfather Mīrzā Muḥammad Tagī Ṭabāṭabā'ī K̲h̲ātambak̲hs̲h̲ was involved in the constitutional revolution and K̲h̲iyābānī's uprising and I naturally had heard a lot about K̲h̲iyābānī through my relatives, both personal curiosity and historical interest made me choose K̲h̲iyābānī as the subject of my research. Some books and articles have been written about K̲h̲iyābānī which are either very superficial or based on misrepresentation. They are superficial because they have not attempted to explain why and how K̲h̲iyābānī's uprising began and the reasons for its success and failure and the role of central government in Tehran in this event is not examined. K̲h̲iyābānī's original speeches and works have not been studied in depth. The opposition to K̲h̲iyābānī's uprising has misrepresented him in different ways. The most striking aspect of this is the fact that he has been accused by his political opponents over and over again of being a "separatist". Some historians have even either spelt K̲h̲iyābānī's name wrongly or copied the errors of others. I came to Edinburgh and was accepted as a postgraduate student in October 1979, and then went to London where I studied and examined the British Foreign office archives and also studied in the British Library. Through the Edinburgh University Library I received some books and newspapers in Russian, French, English, Persian and Azari. Three times I travelled to Iran where I could consult the Iranian Parliamentary documents, newspapers, books and interviewed a number of Iranians who either participated in or had valuable memories of K̲h̲iyābānī's uprising. It is hoped, therefore, that the present study will shed a great deal of light upon a hitherto much-neglected episode in modern Iranian history.

No description available.

Univ., Diss.--Heidelberg, 1989. / Literaturverz. S. 278 - 310.

Thèse--Sciences politiques--Genève, 1979, n °312. / Bibliogr. p. 265-272. Index.

Diss.--Literaturwissenschaft--Saarbrücken, 1981. / Bibliogr. p. 210-224.

This thesis offers an analysis of George Eliot's aesthetics and ethics from the interdisciplinary perspective of literature and theology. I examine the role that religious motifs play in Eliot's "ethics of art," and argue that the motifs of incarnation, revelation, and transcendence are central to Eliot's aesthetic aim of extending her reader's sympathies. Eliot's ethics of art is designed to help her reader transcend his or her inherent egoism, and to improve the way her reader understands his or her own self in relation to the world and to others. An exploration of the religious motifs of incarnation, revelation, and transcendence explains how Eliot achieved this aim without resorting to didacticism or preaching. In order to demonstrate this, the thesis offers a reading of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda in which I employ three concepts that are present in the early philosophical writings of Mikhail Bakhtin; non-alibi in being, excess of seeing, and self/other relations. The motif of incarnation is central to each of these concepts and forms a bridge between Bakhtin's aesthetics and ethics. In applying these concepts to a reading of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, I demonstrate the way in which Eliot's "ethics of art" relies on theological motifs.

Middlemarch is the novel at the centre of this thesis. George Eliot's writing, and Middlemarch in particular, is the paradigm of what has come to be known as Classic Realist fiction. In reading Middlemarch, it seems, one is introduced to a fictional world. The characters are psychologically complex, and they are presented with moral and social problems which are created and discussed with subtlety and intelligence. Until recently, critical assessment of Middlemarch has focussed on evaluation of Eliot's achievement in just these terms. The thesis begins with a question, how, and indeed is it possible for a novel to depict a fiction in this way? The introductory chapter proposes an answer to this question which opens the way to a radical critical appraisal of the status of Middlemarch as a psychologically realistic novel. The scope of the thesis is in one sense very narrow: it is on the ways in which George Eliot creates the moral psychology of her characters, and the ways in which she develops and sustains our interest in their motives, their emotions and in general their mental states and processes. My suggestion is that the language Eliot uses is deeply coloured by her commitments in the Philosophy of Mind. The argument will be that in order to take Eliot's fiction to be psychologically realistic, we are committed to sharing her unacceptable philosophical presuppositions. The second chapter of the thesis is a discussion of Eliot's novella The Lifted Veil. This is an odd piece of fiction, both technically and in subject matter. It does not fit easily into the Eliot canon, and until recently it has received little attention. The purpose of Chapter Two is partly to redress that balance but more to diagnose Eliot's philosophical commitments. The eerie fantasy of unnatural mind-reading reveals Eliot's ideas in a very explicit way. My suggestion is that in the struggle to make this fantasy coherent, a picture of the mind emerges which is both seductive and ultimately nonsensical. Narrow as the focus is, the arguments to establish my point take us deep into Wittgenstein's later Philosophy. The fundamental insight of Wittgenstein's work on the philosophy of mind was that in order to understand how it is possible to talk meaningfully about mental states and processes, we must resist the seductive, ultimately nonsensical picture seemingly imposed upon us by the grammar of ordinary psychological remarks. And if those arguments are thought to be convincing, the thesis has important negative implications for at least one important perennial question in the philosophy of aesthetics. The starting point of this thesis takes seriously the idea that novelists can, and ought to, examine themes of deep human significance. The larger goal of this piece of work has been to open up a line of enquiry which might examine, from within the Analytic tradition in philosophy, the extent to which that task is feasible. I have sought to establish an important connection between the creation of the moral psychology of fictional characters, and Wittgenstein's later work in the philosophy of mind. I believe that the examination I have conducted of the way issues in the philosophy of mind, especially those treated in the Philosophical Investigations, bear on the way Eliot writes places much of the psychological language of Middlemarch in a new light, and discloses certain quite general limits on what is possible in creating fictional minds.