The Mill on the Floss, by Victorian novelist George Eliot, is a polylinguistic novel in Bakhtine's sense of the word in that it integrates the linguistic diversity of the society which it depicts. This novel published in 1860 was translated six times into French but never enjoyed a great reception in France. We examine three translations in this thesis: the first is by Francois D'Albert-Durade (1863), the second is by Lucienne Molitor (1957) and the last is by Alain Jumeau (2003). / D'Albert-Durade's translation evacuates the linguistic diversity in order to shape the novel to the requirements of the target literary polysystem. Molitor, by homogenising the eliotian prose, turns the canonised English novel into a French popular novel. Jumeau, for his part, by rehabilitating the peasant sociolect in his translation, marks the beginning of a rehabilitation movement of George Eliot in France. This study, through the analysis of the voice of a few key characters, attempts to follow the French "translative journey" of The Mill on the Floss.

Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Division of Humanities, Department of English, 2003. / Bibliography: p. 250-270. / Introduction -- Female subjectivity, abjection, and agency in Scenes of clerical life -- A questionable Utopia: Adam Bede -- Dystopia and the frustration of agency in the double Bildungsroman of The mill on the floss -- Abjection and exile in Silas Marner -- Justice and feminist Utopia in Romola -- Radicalism as Utopianism in Felix Holt, the radical -- The pursuit of what is good: Utopian impulses in Middlemarch -- Nationalism and multiculturalism: shaping the future as transformative Utopia in Daniel Deronda. / Within a framework based on Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism and Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, this thesis investigates how Utopian impulses are manifested in George Eliot's novels. Eliot's utopianism is presented first by a critique of dystopian elements in society and later by placing such elements in a dialogic relationship with utopian ideas articulated by leading characters. Each novel includes characters who are abjected because they have different ideas from the social norms, and such characters are silenced and expelled because society evaluates these differences in terms of its gender, class and racial prejudices. Dystopia is thus constituted as a resolution of the conflict between individual and society by the imposition of monologic values. Dialogic possibilities are explored by patterned character configurations and by the cultivation of ironical narrators' voices which enfold character focalization within strategic deployment of free indirect discourse. -- Eliot's early works, from Scenes of Clerical Life to Silas Marner, focus their dystopian elements as a critique of a monologic British society intolerant of multiple consciousnesses, and which consigns "other" voices to abjection and thereby precludes social progress by rejecting these "other" voices. In her later novels, from Romola to Daniel Deronda, Eliot presents concrete model utopian societies that foreshadow progressive changes to the depicted, existing society. Such an imagined society incorporates different consciousnesses and hence admits abject characters, who otherwise would have been regarded as merely transgressive, and thus silenced or eliminated. Abjected characters in Eliot's fiction tend also to be utopists, and hence have potential for positively transforming the world. Where they are depicted as gaining agency, they also in actuality or by implication bring about change in society, the nation and the wider world. -- An underlying assumption is that history can be changed for the better, so that utopian ideals can be actualized by means of human agency rather than by attributing teleological processes to supernatural forces. When a protagonist's utopian impulses fail, it is both because of dystopian elements of society and because of individual human weaknesses. In arguably her most utopian works, Romola and Daniel Deronda, Eliot creates ideal protagonists, one of whom remains in the domestic sphere because of gender, and another who is (albeit voluntarily) removed from British society because of his race/class. However, Romola can be seen as envisaging a basis for female advancement to public life, while Daniel Deronda suggests a new world order through a nationalism grounded in multiculturalism and a global utopianism. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / v, 270 p

Thesis (M.A.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of English, General Literature, and Rhetoric, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

Part of Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1934. / Photolithographed. "Private edition, distributed by the University of Chicago libraries."

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1921. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

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The discussion in this thesis is designed to show reflections of George Eliot's life and philosophy in her four early novels: Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, and Romola.

This study has been made in an attempt to illustrate how the genius that was George Eliot developed, how a magnificent intellect was driven first to achievement by emotional frustration and then was coupled with emotional maturity in person, developing emotional maturity in the creative artist and producing at last the supreme and delicate balance of intellectual and emotional maturity in the philosopher who found her medium in creative art.

This study examines the practical and political implications of sympathy as a mode of achieving the intercommunicative relationship between the self and the other, emphasizing the significance of subjective agency not simply guided by the imperative category of morality but mainly enacted by a hybrid of discourses through the interaction between the two entities. Scenes of Clerical Life, Eliot's first fictional narrative on illuminating the intertwining relation of religion to secular conditions of life, reveals that the essence of religion is the practice of love between the self and the other derived from sympathy and invoked by their dialogic discourses of confession which enable them to foster the communality, on the grounds that the alterity implicated in the narrative of the other summons and re-historicizes the narrative of the subject's traumatic event in the past. Romola, Eliot's historical novel, highlights the performativity of subject which, on the one hand, locates Romola outside the social frame of domination and appropriation as a way of challenging the universalizing discourses of morality and duty sanctioned by the patriarchal ideology of norms, religion, and marriage. On the other hand, the heroine re-engages herself inside the social structure as a response to other's need for help by substantiating her compassion for others in action. Felix Holt, the Radical, Eliot's political and industrial novel, investigates the limits of moral discourse and instrumental reason. Esther employs her strategy of hybridizing her aesthetic and moral tastes in order to debilitate masculine desires for moral inculcation and material calculation. Esther reinvigorates her subjectivity by simultaneously internalizing and externalizing a hybrid of tastes. In effect, the empowerment of her subjectivity is designed not only to provide others with substantial help from the promptings of her sympathy for them, but also to fulfill her romantic plot of marriage.

The thesis will examine the influence of Biblical literature on some of the novels of George Eliot. In doing so it will consider the following aspects of Eliot criticism: current theoretical debate about the use of midrash; modes of discourse and narrative style; prophetic language and vision; the influence of Judaism and Jewish exegetical methods on Adam Bede, "The Lifted Veil", The Mill on the Floss, Felix Holt, and Daniel Deronda. Literary critics have, for a long time, been interested in the influence of the Bible and Biblical hermeneutics on literature and the extent to which Biblical narratives and themes are used typologically and allegorically in fiction has been well researched. In this regard, the concept of midrash is not a new one in literary theory. It refers both to a genre of writing and to an ancient Rabbinic method of exegesis. It has, however, been given new meaning by literary critics and theoriticians such as Frank Kermode, Harold Bloom, and Jacques Derrida. In The Genesis of Secrecy, Kermode gives a new nuance to the word and demonstrates how it may be used to read not only Biblical stories but secular literature as well. It is an innovative, self-reflexive, and intricate hermeneutic processs which has been used by scholars such as Geoffrey Hartman and Sanford Budick, editors of Midrash and Literature, a seminal work in this thesis. Eliot's interest in Judaism and her fascination with religion, religious writing, and religious characters are closely connected to her understanding of the novelist's role as an interpreter of stories. In this regard, the prophetic figure as poet, seer, and interpreter of the past, present, and future of society is of special significance. The thesis will investigate Eliot's reinterpretation of this important Biblical type as well as her retelling of Biblical stories. It will attempt to establish the extent to which Eliot's work may be called midrash, and enter the current debate on how and why literary works have been and can be interpreted. It will address the questions of why Eliot, who abjures normative religious faith, has such a profound interest in the Bible, how the Bible serves her creative purposes, why she is interested in Judaism, and to what extent the latter informs and permeates her novels.