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"Middlemarch"
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My life in Middlemarch
\"Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as \"one of the few English novels written for grown-up people,\" offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not. In this wise and revealing work of biography, reporting, and memoir, Rebecca Mead leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that deftly mirrors that of the novel, My Life in Middlemarch takes the themes of Eliot's masterpiece--the complexity of love, the meaning of marriage, the foundations of morality, and the drama of aspiration and failure--and brings them into our world. Offering both a fascinating reading of Eliot's biography and an exploration of the way aspects of Mead's life uncannily echo that of Eliot herself, My Life in Middlemarch is for every ardent lover of literature who cares about why we read books, and how they read us.\"--From publisher description.
Book
Coreading Middlemarch in Pandemic Times: Using Digital Humanities to Build Community at a Distance
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed a need for new practices of asynchronous reading that generate community. For the University of Washington's Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Research Cluster's 150th Anniversary Middlemarch Symposium, we created a digital edition of Middlemarch through Manifold, a digital humanities tool for e-editions, designed to encourage a practice we call “coreading.” By using digital annotation tools to build open communities of inquiry and crowd-sourced forms of knowledge, this practice decenters traditional forms of scholarship. Coreading allows us to explore the attachments that we form with literature—the affective, the personal and interpersonal, and the intellectual. In our explication of the Manifold Middlemarch project, we discuss the successes and setbacks of this collaborative community engagement, considering the question of what community and collaboration look like under pandemic circumstances, how digital humanities 2.0 projects can help us respond, and how coreading works as a solution for connection in unconnected times.
Journal Article
Middlemarch: A Grown-Up Novel
This short article was originally given as a keynote at the Middlemarch 150th Anniversary Symposium at the University of Washington. It finds a utopian current in Middlemarch in Dorothea's “plans” that pushes against a long critical history of reading the novel as reformist. Specifically, this article looks at the avant-garde paintings of Swedish modernist artist Hilma af Klint to argue for a “diagrammatic” and feminist political aesthetic in Dorothea Brooke's unrealized plans.
Journal Article
Manifold Wakings: Introduction to Middlemarch 150th Anniversary Symposium
This article introduces the 150th Anniversary Online Symposium for Middlemarch hosted by the University of Washington's Graduate Research Cluster on May 21, 2021.
Journal Article
Dorothea Brooke, Gwendolyn Harleth and Hetty Sorrel on the Brink of the Impossible: George Eliot and the Female Bildungsroman
This paper examines the tension between ambition and failure in the trajectories of the female protagonists in three George Eliot novels—Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede (1859), Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch (1871-72), and Gwendolyn Harleth in Daniel Deronda (1876). Building on Franco Moretti’s notion of a ‘distinct female Bildungsroman’, I argue that these characters’ development follows a similar three-step structure as they navigate the constraints of gender, class, and socioeconomic status. The dialectical interplay between ambition and coercion sustains the narratives on the brink of possibility and impossibility, while Eliot’s narrative choices challenge traditional forms of the Bildungsroman, offering a critique of the genre as it applies to women.
Journal Article
The Business of the Novel
This study shows how aesthetics and economics have been combined in a great work of literature. Frost examines the history of Middlemarch's composition and publication within the context of Victorian demand, then goes on to consider the interpretation, reception and consumption of the book.
eBook
Middlemarch in Melbourne
Although it is noted in bibliographies and databases, the serialization of Middlemarch in the Australasian newspaper of Melbourne in 1872–73 has received little critical attention. This article makes a preliminary effort to redress this knowledge gap using a global media history approach anchored by a southern-hemispherical perspective, permitting this canonical British novel to be recontextualized within the flows of transnational circulation. So doing decenters Eurocentric forms of thinking about imperial literary culture and realist aesthetics. Unexpectedly, as a fragmented colonial newspaper serial, Middlemarch—a provincial novel at the center of modern scholarship about European realism and totality—generates a new cultural field in which to theorize global reception history, transimperial culture, and the dialectic between realism and its remediation in, and between, print forms.
Journal Article
A Negotiation in Middlemarch
We analyze a negotiation drawn from George Eliot’s great novel
. Eliot is renowned as a perceptive chronicler of social interaction, and she understood the process of negotiation and its role in the community perhaps as well as anyone. The negotiation in question is between a wealthy banker and a former associate who sets out (or perhaps just ends up) blackmailing him. From this negotiation we draw insights into the importance of preparation and the prenegotiation, empathy, and the fostering of relationships (even when you would prefer not to); and the problems of focusing on one’s own BATNA rather than your counterparts’. We consider six key negotiation lessons for the fictional negotiator (and for us) and reflect on the difficulty of negotiations in which one's self‐regard is at issue in addition to material goods. We conclude with a brief account of how both fictional and “nonfictional” negotiations further our understanding of how to learn about and improve negotiation practice.
Journal Article
Metaphors of Shame in George Eliot's Middlemarch
Shame is a significant concept in George Eliot's Middlemarch thematically, narratively, and linguistically. Integral to the discursive representation of this emotion in the novel is the artistic use of ordinary conceptual metaphors and metonymies as a component of its noted realism. The figurative language deployed is both familiar and extraordinary. It is partially influenced by universal bodily responses to the experience of shame, and partially made accessible through culturally mediated meanings. Eliot's language is also distinctly unique, in that in its discursive context it enacts her own sharp psychological and moral analysis. This article investigates how Eliot uses familiar metaphors of embodied shame—especially blushing and sensations of oppression—to signal the often conflicted and suppressed emotional states of her characters. This nuanced use of familiar figurative constructions relies on conceptual norms shared with the reader, and provides a rich reading experience that arises from the recognition of common embodied affective experience.
Journal Article
Moral Stupidity in Ian McEwan’s Atonement
This paper argues that the major catalyst behind Briony Tallis’ rape accusation in Atonement is due to the ethical issue of moral stupidity. The paper examines why Briony Tallis, the protagonist of Atonement, accuses Robbie Hunter for the rape of her sixteen- year-old cousin, Lola. For much of the scholarship on Atonement, debates on the moral implications of Briony’s accusation have dominated, but none of these studies have examined why Briony indicts Robbie for Lola’s rape, destroying the lives of both Robbie and Cecelia. Therefore, this paper offers a nuanced explanation of Briony’s allegation and actions afterwards. Consequently, Briony is consistently described as stupid both as a child and as an adult and the word 'stupid' is repeated fourteen times in the text, while 'stupidity,' repeated five times. Briony’s behavior early in the text is represented as a serious ethical shortcoming that impedes her own moral compass which is also based on class prejudice, jealousy, and irresponsibility. McEwan embeds Briony’s moral shortcoming in a general atmosphere within the novel of youthful foolishness and naïveté. Unfortunately, it is because of the lack of moral direction that the rape takes place and Briony, out of her blinded ego, indicts an innocent young man.
Journal Article