Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

Greiner, Rae

doi:10.1353/book.19606

Cited by 107 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 148 publications

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“…And most importantly, as Rae Greiner has suggested, sympathy produces and structures the novelist's imaginative processes in realist form. 76 In Rome, Will realizes that he does not want to be a painter: he wants something 'real' and thus unconsciously rejects Naumann's aestheticization of Dorothea. And he acknowledges in a second discussion with Dorothea, after she has asked him about becoming a poet, that poetry only offers brief spells of the experience of 'knowledge passing instantaneously into feeling', which he seeks (M 209).…”

Section: Middlemarchmentioning

confidence: 99%

George Eliot's Italian Roads: Mobility, Temporality and the Crises of Realism in Romola and Middlemarch

Kuehn

2023

Literature & History

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Critics have read Eliot's Romola (1862–3) and Middlemarch (1871–2) as historical novels, as examples of the female Bildungsroman or as oddities and successes, respectively, within Eliot's realist oeuvre. This essay brings these strands of enquiry together in a formalist analysis, suggesting that these must not be seen as separate but connected debates about time, space and Eliot's novelistic poetics. Using Bakhtin's idea of the meaning-making nature of the chronotope, the essay reads momentous ‘road’ scenes in Eliot's two novels. As I argue, the road chronotope does not just represent moments of crisis for the protagonists and is, thus, an agent of narrative and mental change, but it also creates the symbolic, generic and affective registers in which these two novels operate. The road chronotope reveals Eliot's self-conscious experimentation with realism as she grapples with history, the individual's place in the world, and also sympathy, which is central to both her novels and her realist poetics. On a broader scale, the essay thus participates in ongoing scholarly debates about nineteenth-century novelistic form while also acknowledging the current ‘mobilities turn’ in analyses of Victorian fiction.

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Section: Middlemarchmentioning

confidence: 99%

George Eliot's Italian Roads: Mobility, Temporality and the Crises of Realism in Romola and Middlemarch

Kuehn

2023

Literature & History

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“…in ibid., p. 321). Eliot's early provincial fiction has retrospectively, and with good reason, been labeled "realist" (Auyoung 2018;Brilmyer 2022;Freedgood 2019;Greiner 2012;Jaffe 2016;Shaw 1999;Yeazell 2008). Her meticulously written novels, however, came with much suffering.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Religion Counts: Faithful Realism and Historical Representation in George Eliot’s Romola

Bonfiglio

2024

Religions

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This article explores the importance of faith in the Victorian historical novel, with a particular focus on George Eliot’s Romola (1862–1863), and rethinks past secularist approaches to the genre. Romola was arguably the most meticulously researched historical novel of the nineteenth century. Set in Florence from 1492 to 1498, the novel traces the rise and fall of the Dominican friar, Girolamo Savonarola, as he pursued the spiritual and political reform of the city, leading to his excommunication and martyrdom. Despite the religious setting of the novel, Eliot’s painstaking effort to imagine a realistic historical representation of Florentine society has often been approached in secular terms as a tour de force of the author’s humanist vision of a progressive march towards modernity. Building on recent work in postsecular studies, this essay rethinks the novel’s historical realism in terms of Christian faith. Centering on the spiritual journey of the protagonist, Romola de’ Bardi, the novel presents a faithful depiction of Renaissance Florence by imagining historical representation as an act of faith. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s essay, “Faith and Knowledge”, the article analyzes how Eliot frames the significance of the novel’s historical representation as an act of faith that one’s life is bound meaningfully to those of others.

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Arboreal Thinking: George Eliot and the Matter of Life in Adam Bede

Livesey

2019

Anticipatory Materialisms in Literature and Philosophy, 1790–1930

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Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

Cited by 107 publications

References 148 publications

George Eliot's Italian Roads: Mobility, Temporality and the Crises of Realism in Romola and Middlemarch

George Eliot's Italian Roads: Mobility, Temporality and the Crises of Realism in Romola and Middlemarch

Religion Counts: Faithful Realism and Historical Representation in George Eliot’s Romola

Arboreal Thinking: George Eliot and the Matter of Life in Adam Bede

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