Working at the intersection between the scholarly fields of affect, gender and print media, my thesis argues that George Eliot's conception of art as a means of extending sympathy was integral to her authorship during 1851-64. Eliot's authorial formation as a promoter of sympathetic feeling was, to a large degree, a product of and a critical response to a burgeoning print culture. Her concern with sympathy during the early years of her journalistic and literary careers permeated both her writing and her relationship with critics, editors, publishers and readers. It is the diverse meanings that such discourse acquired for her in the nineteenthcentury literary market-place that this thesis examines. Eliot's attempt to build sympathetic ties amongst her readers without being intimate with them is another example of her ambiguous relationship to the woman question. Rather than focusing on the well-known emotive rhetoric in her fiction, my aim is to see how she aspired to control the feelings she incited in her readership, partly through her male pseudonym and partly through her realism. By looking into her publishing policies and reading habits, in addition to the familiar concerns with genre and style, I intend to treat her development into the pseudonymously-signed realist author `George Eliot' as a distinct gendered formation within the history of sentiment. Through close readings of her reviews, poetry and early fiction, my thesis explores the gap between her self-fashioned authorial figure and popular constructions of her authorship. In addition to looking into her relationship with her male predecessors and contemporaries (Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, John Ruskin), it traces her interest in sympathetic women of the past (Mary Wollstonecraft), popular fiction writers (Mary Elizabeth Braddon) or campaigners for women's rights (Bessie Rayner Parkes).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:442540 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Hadjiafxendi, Kyriaki |
| Publisher | University of East Anglia |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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