<p>George Eliot's later novels are discussed with reference to Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogism. Although Bakhtin traces dialogism from comedy and carnival, Eliot's dialogism is rooted in tragedy. Romola is set during Florentine carnival and Savonarola's sacred parody of carnival. While Eliot and Bakhtin, following Goethe, both use carnival as an image of ambivalence, in contrast to Bakhtin, Eliot recognizes carnival's violence when it is not simply a metaphor. Deviations from a key intertext, Paquale Villari's Ufe and Times of Girolamo Savonarola, are critical to understanding the novel's ambivalence. Felix Holt and The Spanish Gypsy are studied in light of Eliot's discussion of tragedy, a genre that Eliot argues contains irreconcilable positions. Neither work arrives at an absolute pronouncement for dealing with social inequities. Although Felix has usually been seen as Eliot's mouthpiece, I argue that Felix Holt and the separately published address are dialogic and Eliot does not present any simplistic single correct course for English politics.</p> <p>Bakhtin's discussion of the difference between epic and novel is a starting point for looking at Eliot's use of parodic heroes in Middlemarch, in which incessant parody provides multiple views on every action or word, and large abstract truths cannot be found. Harriet Martineau is introduced as a model for Dorothea's possibilities, and the monologism of Martineau's work forms a contrast for Middlemarch. In Daniel Deronda, Eliot's hero realizes his inability to believe in an epic stance, and the possibility of politics is challenged. Daniel is paralyzed, unable to act because of his own consciousness of dialogism. The Zionism eventually embraced by Daniel is not endorsed absolutely but is subject to the various perspectives of the novel. The usual understanding of the concluding allusion to Milton's Samson Agonistes is challenged by examining Milton's depiction of the conflicting duties of family and nation.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis examines four translations and retranslations of novels by British female writers. They are Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, George Eliot’s Silas Marner, and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The translations and retranslations, eight target texts in total, are mapped onto the sociopolitical and sociocultural milieu of China from the late 1920s to 1930s. During the span of time when the eight translations were published, China was undergoing a special period of political turbulence intertwined with literary vibrancy. With the literary field of China segmented into various literary societies or political organizations subscribing to their respective doctrines and principles, Chinese intellectuals including translators from various backgrounds produced literature and translation within the agenda of their respective literary or political societies. The heart of this thesis’s theoretical framework is the role of agents of translation involved the practice of translation production. The interaction amongst the human and nonhuman agents: translators, patrons, intellectuals, literary institutions, publishers and more, are examined in order to identify the translation motivations of the translators. The seven translators covered in the present study are categorized into three distinctive groups: the leftists, the humanists and the commercial translators. A collective analysis of the translators’ behaviour should shed light on the general understanding of the intended social functions of these translated novels written by British female writers published during Republican China.

This study focuses on a series of late-century works by women writers that incorporate facets of theatrical performance into the printed book. Literary drama was a common genre of the Victorian and Edwardian period, used by writers such as Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold to elevate drama to the status of literature, a term synonymous with the printed page and the experience of reading. However, this project examines a series of women writers who, in contrast, used this hybrid form to challenge the assumed superiority of text. The values ascribed to the printed page—that it was a disembodied enterprise unattached to the whims of its audience or the particularities of its author—were antithetical to the experiences of women writers, whose work was often read in the context of their gendered bodies. My study proceeds chronologically, reading the literary dramas of five writers—George Eliot, Augusta Webster, Katharine Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper (writing under the pseudonym “Michael Field”), and Elizabeth Robins—alongside changes in print practice and theatrical staging as well as evolving discourses about “literariness.” I argue that these women allude to theatrical performance in the text to show that the page always bears the physical traces of its authors and its audience. Each chapter blends book studies with performance studies, showing the way the form of a work invites particular responses from its readers. Overall, this project has two goals: one, to recover marginalized texts by women writers and revise narratives about the period to incorporate these pieces; and two, to span the scholarly chasm between Victorian poetry and drama and demonstrate, instead, the mutually constitutive relationship of these two art forms.

By Her Own Hand: Female Agency Through Self-Castration in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction explores the intentional methods of self-castration that lead to authorial empowerment. The project relies on the following self-castration formula: the author’s recognition of herself as a being defined by lack. This lack refers to the inability to signify within the phallocentric system of language. In addition to this initial recognition, the female author realizes writing for public consumption emulates the process of castration but, nevertheless, initiates the writing process as a way to resituate the origin of castration—placing it in her own hand. The female writer also recognizes her production as feminine and, therefore works to castrate her own femininity in her pursuit to create texts that are liberated from the critical assignation of “feminine productions.” Female self-castration is a violent act of displacement. As the author gains empowerment through the writing process, she creates characters that bear the mark of castration. The text opens a field of play in which the author utilizes the page as a way to cut, disfigure, or erase the feminine sexual body. On the authorial level, the feminine writer works through her self-castration process through the process of writing, editing, and publication. Within the text, her characters demonstrate a will toward liberation from authorial productive hegemony by carrying the mark of their creator’s castration and by taking on the power the process allocates to the writer.

This thesis works towards establishing a legacy of influence between George Eliot’s “The Lifted Veil” and Henry James’ “The Beast in the Jungle.” Through an exploration of James’ relationship to Eliot’s oeuvre and a close study of the two works in tandem, it will become apparent the influence Eliot’s slight Gothic story held on James’ celebrated short story. Furthermore, this thesis will introduce another chapter of the growing critical tradition of studying the relationship between George Eliot and Henry James.

This thesis presents a text-image analysis of George Eliot‘s fourth novel, Romola (1862-63) based on the argument that the text and the illustrations by Sir Frederic Leighton introduce a discourse about the development of art from a Vasarian perspective. Both the text and the illustrations begin by portraying Romola with references to ancient Greek art and culminate in displaying her as a version of Raphael‘s Sistine Madonna. This implies not only the belief, current in Victorian artistic circles, that Raphael‘s work was the highest achievement in the history of art, but also that this historical development from ancient Greek sculpture to High Renaissance painting reflects the moral development of European civilization. As an idealized allegory for European civilization itself, Romola fulfills both moral and artistic roles as her moral progress from paganism to Eliot‘s religion of humanity closely follows her visual progress from a Greek statue to a Raphaelesque Madonna. The thesis is informed by the historiographical and fictional contexts of the Victorian historical novel and their influence on Eliot‘s work, as well as the tradition of historical painting and its importance for Frederic Leighton‘s paintings and illustrations. The concept of progress—historical, moral, and visual—is emphasized throughout.

This study analyzes the moral development of George Eliot&#039 / s characters in her novel Middlemarch according to Lawrence Kohlberg&#039 / s theory called &quot / The Cognitive-Developmental Theory of Moralization&quot / . Eliot&#039 / s moral view is characterized by man&#039 / s relation with other men, not man&#039 / s relation with God. As long as the individuals treat others with sympathy and understanding, they can develop morally. Eliot&#039 / s aim is to contribute to the creation of a happier society by presenting the harms of egoism. According to Kohlberg&#039 / s theory, individuals can develop their role taking abilities parallel to their cognitive developments. This development is displayed by three levels and at the heighest level an individual can go beyond the expectations of society with principles of justice and respect for basic human rights and dignity. However, although the characters in Eliot&#039 / s novel are sometimes in conflict with the society, they tend to find solutions to their problems within the social structure they live in because Eliot contends that the harmony of society is more important than the personal satisfaction and happiness of individuals for the welfare and happiness of humanity as a whole.

No description available.

Victorian serial novels were bound with pages upon pages of advertisements marketing goods to readers, yet the relative inattention paid to this significant material component of the novel is surprising. This project explores the interaction between fictional narrative and commercial advertisements, and aims to recover the material context in which three Victorian novels—Bleak House, Middlemarch, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—were first published and read. These three case studies—a novel published in 20 monthly serial numbers, another packaged in the rare format of eight “books” in bimonthly installments, and the third published in a monthly magazine in three excerpts—are exemplary of a larger phenomenon in Victorian book production wherein fiction and commerce were inextricably bound. This project investigates the ways in which the advertisements can be reconceived as a significant element of the novel, mediating the reader’s experience of the text. The Bleak House chapter examines how the advertisements for hair products in the “Bleak House Advertiser” serve to highlight an aspect of Charles Dickens’s text about Victorian responses to the mass of new consumer goods and individuals’ desire to control the physical aspects of their world. The following chapter considers George Eliot’s (Mary Ann Evans’s) Middlemarch, finding that just as the narrator’s asides compel readers to attend to the temporal difference between the 1830s setting of the novel and the 1870s perspective of the serial edition, sewing machine advertisements in the advertising supplement of the novel serve to remind readers of their role as observers of past events. The examination of Mark Twain’s (Samuel Clemens’s) Huck Finn, as published in three excerpts in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, demonstrates that the magazine articles, the excerpts from Huck Finn, and the advertisements all engage in a project of unifying the nation and alleviating the physical and metaphorical wounds of war. The unity of the message emerges when the excerpts are read together with the many advertisements for wheelchairs and other such implements for disabled bodies. The dissertation ends with a chapter indicating the merits of further analysis and critical discussion of advertisements in the undergraduate literature classroom. / text

This dissertation critically examines why mid-Victorian fiction often dismisses or complicates monetary transactions and monetary charity, even as it negatively portrays differences in social status and wealth. I argue that the novel uses representations of failed charity to reconstruct, however briefly, a non- monetary and non-economic source of value. Further, I examine how the novel uses techniques of both genre and style to predict, form, and critique alternate, non-economic, social models. While tension surrounding the practice of charity arises in the late eighteenth century, the increasing dominance of political economy in public discourse forced Victorian literature to take a strong stance, for reasons of both ethics and genre. This stance is complicated by the eighteenth-century legacy that sees charity as a kind of luxury. If giving to the poor makes us feel good, this logic suggests, surely it isn’t moral. Thus, while much eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature remains dedicated to the ethics of charity, the practice becomes immensely complex. By discussing the works of Tobias Smollett, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Eliot, this project exposes a wide variety of responses to this deep cultural anxiety. These authors are, ultimately, strongly invested in redefining the meaning of benevolence as a valid form of social action by moving that benevolence away from monetary gifts and toward abstractly correct moral feelings, though their individual solutions vary widely. / text