In Middlemarch, George Eliot famously warns readers not to see themselves as the centre of their own world, which produces a ‘flattering illusion of concentric arrangement’. The scholarly contributors to Antipodean George Eliot resist this form of centrism. Hailing from four continents and six countries, they consider Eliot from a variety of de-centred vantage points, exploring how the obscure and marginal in Eliot’s life and work sheds surprising light on the central and familiar. With essays that span the full range of Eliot’s career―from her early journalism, to her major novels, to eccentric late works such as Impressions of Theophrastus Such―Antipodean George Eliot is committed to challenging orthodoxies about Eliot’s development as a writer, overturning received ideas about her moral and political thought, and unveiling new contexts for appreciating her unparalleled significance in nineteenth-century letters.
Author(s): Margaret Harris, Matthew Sussman
Series: The Nineteenth Century Series
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 230
City: New York
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
About the Contributors
Acknowledgements
Texts and Abbreviations
Introduction
Notes
1 George Eliot Elsewhere
Village Life: Circumscribing George Eliot, the Novelist of Middle England
Local and the Global: George Eliot, the Critical Cosmopolitan
Empire as Elsewhere for Others
George Eliot Imagining Elsewhere
Conclusion: George Eliot Elsewhere
Notes
2 Before Scenes of Clerical Life: Eliot’s 1854–57 Travelogues as Poetic Practice
A Voyage Out
Place
Character
Voice(s) and the Narrator Figure
Conclusion
Notes
3 George Eliot and ‘The Case of Wagner’: Fabrications and Speculations
Notes
4 The Mill On the Floss and the Novel in Bengal
Notes
5 A Roar of Sound: George Eliot On Sympathy and the Problem of Other Minds
Three Problems for Mind and Morality
The Insufficiency of Intellect Or Feeling to Alone Ground Morality
Egoism and the Difficulty of Developing Moral Reciprocity
Ways of Knowing—Ways of Being
Notes
6 Sympathy and Alterity: The Ethical Sublime in Romola
Notes
7 Reading the Riot Act: The Case of Felix Holt, the Radical
Riotous Acts
Radical Description
Notes
8 Middlemarch and Reform: Looking Back Versus ‘The Thick of It’
Christian Isobel Johnstone and Political Journalism
National Politics, 1829–35
Christian Johnstone’s ‘Pry’ Series, 1834–35
Tait’s and Middlemarch
George Eliot and Progressive Change
Conclusion
Notes
9 The Grounds of Exception: Liberal Sympathy and Its Limits in Daniel Deronda and C.H. Pearson’s National Life and Character
Notes
10 Counter Impressions: Ambiguous Habits in Impressions of Theophrastus Such
Habit as Character: ‘A Too Deferential Man’
Gender as Habit: ‘Diseases of Small Authorship’
Consciousness and Habit: ‘Shadows of the Coming Race’
Conclusion
Notes
11 Impressions of Theophrastus Such and the Limitations of Depth
The Anatomy of Confession, Or a Confession of Anatomy
‘The Ridiculous Must Be Seen Where It Exists’
Notes
Works Cited
Index
