This thesis is a study of George Eliot's moral philosophy as revealed in her novels. Since the novelist's ethical creed did not undergo any radical change after 1350, I have devoted the initial chapter to a discussion of her early training and reading. In Chapter two, an analysis is made of George Eliot's early works of fiction. As a result, both of her religious training and her avid reading of moralistic literature, she is too prone to pass judgement on her characters. Sometimes sympathetic to her creations, she is often intolerant of moral laxity in these novels. In Middlemarch, this ambivalence of moral vision is no longer noticeable; the voice of the austere moralist, judging by inflexible standards, is muted. This development is partially attributable to a more skilful and less frequent use of didactic devices than hitherto. Chapter three is therefore devoted to an analysis of the novelist's didactic technique in Middlemarch. The final chapter shows that George Eliot the moral philosopher has also developed in Middlemarch. Her views have not altered radically, but her outlook is more catholic, and the elements in her ethical creed are blended more effectively than in her early novels. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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This thesis has studied the woven of George Eliot's Middlemarch in order to demonstrate the author's concern with and understanding of the dangers inherent in lives lived in provincial surroundings with severely limited options for exercise of capabilities and fulfillment of goals. Eliot's questioning of the nineteenth century's attitudes towards women's roles has been examined by studying the imagery used to characterize the women in the novel, by analyzing the folk "wisdom" which the inhabitants of Middlemarch use to define women, by interpreting Eliot's presentation of Dorothea Brooke's attempts to escape her provincial setting, by discussing the novel's criticism of the traditional role of wife and mother.In addition, this paper has surveyed important critical studies of Middlemarch., noting various scholarly interpretations of the novel, especially of the parts played by the women characters.

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<p>This work offers a reading of George Eliot's last two novels, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. The thesis challenges the place both Realist critics and post-structuralist theorists ordinarily assign to these two novels in literary history. It does so by locating these works in the context of a number of important contemporaneous developments in pathology, comparative anatomy, evolutionary biology, geology and the philosophy of scientific method. In each of these fields there was a growing sense of the formative and constitutive function of method in any inquiry. This discursive conception of the necessary dependence of the answer on the nature of the question poses a challenge to the purported neutrality and transparency of what has been conceived as literary Realism. I argue here that Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, though they are novels which traditionally have been placed within literary Realism, actually incorporate these contemporaneous developments in epistemology. Though these novels do not eschew didacticism, their awareness of methodological changes in a variety of scholarly fields modifies the nature of narrative authority vouchsafed by making it provisional and historically specific.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This report modifies and re-envisions Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt theory as the “sympathetic umwelt,” in which sympathy is both the external object of desire and the internal means by which individual, subjective worlds are created. Through the application of this new paradigm to George Eliot’s “The Lifted Veil” and Middlemarch, this paper suggests that intersubjective relationships in the fictions she conceives are ephemeral illusions. Her early cognitive experiments and intellectual grappling with the nature of emotional connections culminates in the ambiguously defined concept of sympathy. Eliot’s focus on sympathy is not meant to reveal a solution to failures in human compassion and understanding, but to present it as the central problem – both in her own literature and in reality. / text

In this thesis I examine the evolving social and personal attitudes about marriage and love as depicted in George Eliot's Middlemarch by arguing that Eliot anticipates modern marriages by critiquing traditional Victorian marital values. For the purposes of this analysis, the applicable aspects of modern marriage are sexuality, shifting gender roles, and a dismissal of social class as the major factor in choosing a partner. In order to achieve this end, I apply close textual analysis as well as a New Historical approach to examine how Middlemarch is conditioned by its historical context.

The diploma thesis Journey of Desire: Romanticism in the Novels of George Eliot is focused on the characteristic romantic items in the novels of the important English woman writer of the 19th century using the pseudonym George Eliot. The thesis deals with just three of the novels: The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch and Silas Marner. The thesis is focused not only on the romantic items which were characteristic for this woman novelist and which were used just in those three novels, but also on the individual development and dynamics of the female characters in the mentioned novels (especially in the novels The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch). The diploma thesis is divided into the different chapters presenting topics concerning the life of the author, the period in which she were wrtiting her novels, the Victorian novel as such and the analysis of the development of the characters in Eliot?s novels.

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