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"Beer, Gillian, author"
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Alice in space : the sideways Victorian world of Lewis Carroll
An examination of Carroll's books about Alice explores the contextual knowledge of the time period in which it was written, addressing such topics as time, games, mathematics, and taxonomies.
Book
Darwin's Plots
Gillian Beer's landmark book demonstrates how Darwin overturned fundamental cultural assumptions in his narratives, how George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and other writers pursued and resisted their contradictory implications, and how the stories he produced about natural selection and the struggle for life now underpin our culture. This second edition of Darwin's Plots incorporates a new preface by the author and a foreword by the distinguished American scholar George Levine.
eBook
WRITING WAS AS DANGEROUS AS LIFE
As she wrote to her most enduring friend, Barbara Bodichon: ''I am a very blessed woman, am I not? to have all this reason for being glad that I have lived, in spite of my sins and sorrows - or rather, by reason of my sins and sorrows.'' The novelist Lynn Linton's malicious and vigorous attack, in ''My Literary Life,'' on [GEORGE ELIOT]'s achieved character (''a made woman'') expressed the contradictions in which Eliot found herself: she wished, Mrs. Linton wrote, ''to be at once conventional and insurgent . . . the self-reliant lawbreaker and the eager postulant for the recognition granted only to the covenanted.'' Mr. [Gordon S. Haight]'s grand nine-volume edition of the letters gave readers access to the intellectual and emotional vigor of the Victorians. In that complete edition a good many letters to George Eliot were included that allowed us to assess the responses of her intimates. Mr. Haight succeeds in this more succinct selection in sustaining (even in the absence of their letters) our awareness of the personalities of a great many people with whom George Eliot corresponded. He gives us a shrewd account of the philosopher Herbert Spencer and of the Hebrew scholar Emanuel Deutsch, who brought to its great conclusion a conversion in Eliot's views on Judaism and the Jewish people. In her very early life she was capable of writing ''everything specifically Jewish is of low grade.'' Her reading of Hebrew, and especially her friendship with Deutsch, totally transformed her attitude by the time she reached her literary maturity. Deutsch's influence is particularly strong in this selection of the letters, and the advantage of the current project is that what it loses in spaciousness it gains in intensity. For example, the account of her stepson Thornie's illness is now starkly moving. Unfortunately, some figures more or less vanish, like the feminist philosopher Edith Simcox. Eliot's pleasures, particularly music and friendship, are clearly evident and her interests in anthropology and psychology are given considerable prominence. Her cheerful and sometimes caustic joking is one of the features Mr. Haight allows us to enjoy: ''I don't like anything that is troublesome under the name of pleasure - from eating shrimps upwards.'' ''One touch of biliousness makes the whole world kin.'' Mr. Haight also includes a number of newly discovered letters. The editing gives the lie to George Eliot's own fears that ''Letters are necessarily narrow and fragmentary.'' On the contrary, this collection gives us a buoyant sense of a life lived in full emotional, analytical and intellectual identity.
Newspaper Article
Women's Poetry and Religion in Victorian England
Victorian women poets lived in a time when religion was a vital aspect of their identities. Cynthia Scheinberg examines Anglo-Jewish (Grace Aguilar and Amy Levy) and Christian (Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti) women poets, and argues that there are important connections between the discourses of nineteenth-century poetry, gender and religious identity. Further, Scheinberg argues that Jewish and Christian women poets had a special interest in Jewish discourse; calling on images from Judaism and the Hebrew Scriptures, their poetry created complex arguments about the relationships between Jewish and female artistic identity. She suggests that Jewish and Christian women used poetry as a site for creative and original theological interpretation, and that they entered into dialogue through their poetry about their own and each other's religious and artistic identities. This book's interdisciplinary methodology calls on poetics, religious studies, feminist literary criticism, and little read Anglo-Jewish primary sources.
eBook
Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920
In this 2001 book Pamela Thurschwell examines the intersection of literary culture, the occult and new technology at the fin-de-siècle. Thurschwell argues that technologies began suffusing the public imagination from the mid-nineteenth century on: they seemed to support the claims of spiritualist mediums. Talking to the dead and talking on the phone both held out the promise of previously unimaginable contact between people: both seemed to involve 'magical thinking'. Thurschwell looks at the ways in which psychical research, the scientific study of the occult, is reflected in the writings of such authors as Henry James, George du Maurier and Oscar Wilde, and in the foundations of psychoanalysis. This study offers provocative interpretations of fin-de-siècle literary and scientific culture in relation to psychoanalysis, queer theory and cultural history.
eBook
Victorian writing about risk : imagining a safe England in a dangerous world
In Victorian Writing about Risk, first published in 2000, Elaine Freedgood explores the geography of risk produced by a wide spectrum of once-popular literature. The consolations this geography of risk offers are precariously predicated on dominant Victorian definitions of people and places which have assigned identities which allow risk to be located and contained.
eBook
Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust
Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust investigates human curiosity and its representation in eavesdropping scenes in nineteenth-century English and French novels. Ann Gaylin argues that eavesdropping dramatizes a primal human urge to know and offers a paradigm of narrative transmission and reception of information among characters, narrators and readers. Gaylin sheds light on the social and psychological effects of the nineteenth-century rise of information technology and accelerated flow of information, as manifested in the anxieties about - and delight in - displays of private life and its secrets. Analysing eavesdropping in Austen, Balzac, Collins, Dickens and Proust, Gaylin demonstrates the flexibility of the scene to produce narrative complication or resolution; to foreground questions of gender and narrative agency; to place the debates of privacy and publicity within the literal and metaphoric spaces of the nineteenth-century novel. This 2003 study will be of interest to scholars of nineteenth-century English and European literature.
eBook