Imagining Locality and Affiliation: George Eliot's Villages

McDonagh, Josephine

doi:10.1002/9781118542347.ch25

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…While this passage seems to express admiration at the fact that more and more Victorians were able to travel—if not in person then via books or panoramas (as is suggested by ‘theatre’), its gentle irony implies that they should first make themselves thoroughly acquainted with their own hedgerows and compatriots before colonising other peoples and landscapes. As Josephine McDonagh observes in her essay on the representation of villages in Eliot's novels (McDonagh, ), a bond with one's local surroundings—or, in ecocritic Ursula Heise's terms, a sense of place (Heise, )—is central to Eliot's thinking. In Daniel Deronda (1876), Eliot's narrator claims that sentimental attachment to the place where we have grown up is just as vital to our healthy development as the presence of a mother: ‘A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of native land’ (Eliot, , 16).…”

Section: A Sense Of Placementioning

confidence: 99%

Uprooted by modernity

Hacke

2018

Orbis Litterarum

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Through a close reading of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, this paper argues that the genre of the Bildungsroman is particularly suited to an ecocritical interpretation. As a realist Antibildungsroman depicting the tragically problematic Bildung of Maggie Tulliver and her family, The Mill on the Floss counters conventional nineteenth‐century coming‐of‐age novels, which tended to become scripts of industrial capitalism and bourgeois culture. Eliot's portrayal of life at Dorlcote Mill confirms that the human and the natural worlds are inherently intertwined, but also demonstrates that capitalist modernity constructs nature as an entity separate from and inferior to man, thus estranging people from their roots.

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Section: A Sense Of Placementioning

confidence: 99%

Uprooted by modernity

Hacke

2018

Orbis Litterarum

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“…The Poor Law Amendment Act (1834), for instance, shifted the locus of local government from the single parish to the multiparish union. 28 Similarly, the Municipal Corporations Act (1835) subordinated multiple local authorities under a single elected council. Such reforms prompted new models of local government unfolding at scales between the parish and the nation-state.…”

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confidence: 99%

Reforming “Petty Politics!”: George Eliot and the Politicization of the Local State

Martel¹

2019

Victorian Literature and Culture

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Situating George Eliot within mid-Victorian debates over central versus local government, this article contests the widespread presupposition that Eliot rejected official politics in favor of cultural mediation. Specifically, I argue that in Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871–72), Eliot seeks to kindle a desire for local political institutions and to promote, in J. S. Mill's words, “the capacities moral, intellectual, and active required for working” them. Using the representative protocols of the local press, Eliot portrays Middlemarch's public health institutions as both opaque and transparent. While the public health work of Tertius Lydgate is essential to the novel's bildung plots and the town's cholera response, it is only represented obliquely through narrative paralipsis. In contrast, Eliot stages local council debates theatrically in scenes whose typography mimics the local press's treatment of council meetings. Eliot then supplements these protocols with the realist novel's networked form, which compels readers to supply characterological depth to the elided labors of Lydgate and the dramatic representations of council meetings. In thus depicting local representative government, Eliot prompts a desire for local political institutions and trains her readers in the cognitive skills needed to participate within them.

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Imagining Locality and Affiliation: George Eliot's Villages

Cited by 2 publications

References 11 publications

Uprooted by modernity

Uprooted by modernity

Reforming “Petty Politics!”: George Eliot and the Politicization of the Local State

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