Vocation and Desire

Vocation and Desire PDF Author: Dorothea Barrett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317294904
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Book Description
First published in 1989. Generations of critics have seen George Eliot as a conservative Victorian high moralist and sybil. Vocation and Desire questions that image, and finds in her work elements of anger, feminism, subversiveness, revenge, iconoclasm, wit, and eroticism – elements that we have been taught not to expect. After looking at the development of the sybilline image and the gradual eclipse of the subversive George Eliot – which Eliot herself initiated – Dorothea Barrett goes on to investigate the evidence of the novels themselves and finds an alternative emphasis. Her study of the heroines of the six major novels and issues of language and desire provides a refreshing and acute analysis of the contradictions and strengths of Eliot’s work. She also considers the reception of George Eliot by feminist critics and the broader implications of her work for contemporary feminism. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

George Eliot and Her Heroines

George Eliot and Her Heroines PDF Author: Abba Louisa Goold Woolson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Book Description


Middlemarch

Middlemarch PDF Author: George Elliott
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1425040527
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 486

Book Description
An extraordinary masterpiece written from personal experience, Middlemarch is a deep psychological observation of human nature that revolves around the issues of love, jealousy, and obligation. Eliot's feminist views are apparent through the novel: she stresses the fact that women should control their own lives.

Silly Novels by Lady Novelists

Silly Novels by Lady Novelists PDF Author: George Eliot
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
In this essay, originally published anonymously in The Westminster Review (1856), George Eliot examines the state of women's fiction in her time. She lamentingly argues that absurd and banal novels, written by well-to-do women of her time, do great disservice for the overall appreciation of women's intellectual capacities. Eliot divides 'silly novels by lady novelists' into several distinct categories: the mind-and-millinery species, the oracular type and the white-neck-cloth variety. She writes with characteristic sharp wit and insightful intellect in this scathing (but not unfeeling) feminist critique of 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists'. This edition includes illustrations from the books critiqued by Eliot, along with annotations. George Eliot (Marian/Mary Ann Evans) was born in Warwickshire England in 1819. She went on to become one of England's most astute nineteenth century writers. Eliot is the author of celebrated novels including Adam Bede (1859), Middlemarch (1871-1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876). She also published non-fiction essays, poems and short stories, and was a skilled translator of German-language philosophy, including works by Strauss, Feuerbach and Spinoza. Eliot's writing is characterised by gritty realism entwined with deep empathy and keen insight into human life and ethics. Sarah Bacaller is a writer, researcher and audiobook producer from Melbourne, Australia.

Too Much

Too Much PDF Author: Rachel Vorona Cote
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 1538729717
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description
Lacing cultural criticism, Victorian literature, and storytelling together, "TOO MUCH spills over: with intellect, with sparkling prose, and with the brainy arguments of Vorona Cote, who posits that women are all, in some way or another, still susceptible to being called too much." (Esmé Weijun Wang) A weeping woman is a monster. So too is a fat woman, a horny woman, a woman shrieking with laughter. Women who are one or more of these things have heard, or perhaps simply intuited, that we are repugnantly excessive, that we have taken illicit liberties to feel or fuck or eat with abandon. After bellowing like a barn animal in orgasm, hoovering a plate of mashed potatoes, or spraying out spit in the heat of expostulation, we've flinched-ugh, that was so gross. I am so gross. On rare occasions, we might revel in our excess--belting out anthems with our friends over karaoke, perhaps--but in the company of less sympathetic souls, our uncertainty always returns. A woman who is Too Much is a woman who reacts to the world with ardent intensity is a woman familiar to lashes of shame and disapproval, from within as well as without. Written in the tradition of Shrill, Dead Girls, Sex Object and other frank books about the female gaze, TOO MUCH encourages women to reconsider the beauty of their excesses-emotional, physical, and spiritual. Rachel Vorona Cote braids cultural criticism, theory, and storytelling together in her exploration of how culture grinds away our bodies, souls, and sexualities, forcing us into smaller lives than we desire. An erstwhile Victorian scholar, she sees many parallels between that era's fixation on women's "hysterical" behavior and our modern policing of the same; in the space of her writing, you're as likely to encounter Jane Eyre and Lizzie Bennet as you are Britney Spears and Lana Del Rey. This book will tell the story of how women, from then and now, have learned to draw power from their reservoirs of feeling, all that makes us "Too Much."

George Eliot in Context

George Eliot in Context PDF Author: Margaret Harris
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107244250
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 367

Book Description
Prodigiously learned, alive to the massive social changes of her time, defiant of many Victorian orthodoxies, George Eliot has always challenged her readers. She is at once chronicler and analyst, novelist of nostalgia and monumental thinker. In her great novel Middlemarch she writes of 'that tempting range of relevancies called the universe'. This volume identifies a range of 'relevancies' that inform both her fictional and her non-fictional writings. The range and scale of her achievement are brought into focus by cogent essays on the many contexts - historical, intellectual, political, social, cultural - to her work. In addition there are discussions of her critical history and legacy, as well as of the material conditions of production and distribution of her novels and her journalism. The volume enables fuller understanding and appreciation, from a twenty-first-century standpoint, of the life and work of one of the nineteenth century's major writers.

The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot

The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot PDF Author: George Levine
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521664738
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Book Description
This volume of essays is comprehensively, scholarly and lucidly written, and at the same time offers original insights into the work of one of the most important Victorian novelists, and into her complex and often scandalous career.

American Rapture

American Rapture PDF Author: Jordan Claire McCraw
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781735335629
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
This collection is for all the women who have done everything "right" but who still end up in a gutter- who have an empowered sense of humor about it all, but who are also pissed off and unfulfilled. No more lies. No more pretending. Whether we have lost our self-concept to our own broken childhoods, to motherhood, to careers, to marriages, to the wrong lovers- it is time for women to champion one another's truths, to embrace our worth and to dispel the toxic expectations of perfection that we have placed on ourselves. Borne out of the author's postpartum depression journey (and subsequent nervous breakdown) and sexual awakening in her thirties, Jordan's poems explore the interweaving of relationships, loss, healing, and self-worth. This collection of poetry follows the trajectory of self-exploration through relationships that have broken down and brought her closer to herself, prior to and in the aftermath of hospitalization- predominantly, the abandonment of Jordan's mother, a trauma which only manifested once her own baby was placed in her arms. Jordan's bicultural marriage and experiences as an immigrant in Great Britain further highlight the complexity of a modern woman's quest for personhood.

The Marriage Plot

The Marriage Plot PDF Author: Jeffrey Eugenides
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429969180
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book of 2011 A Publisher's Weekly Top 10 Book of 2011 A Kirkus Reviews Top 25 Best Fiction of 2011 Title One of Library Journal's Best Books of 2011 A Salon Best Fiction of 2011 title One of The Telegraph's Best Fiction Books of the Year 2011 It's the early 1980s—the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. As Madeleine tries to understand why "it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France," real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead—charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy—suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her old "friend" Mitchell Grammaticus—who's been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange—resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate. Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology Laboratory on Cape Cod, but can't escape the secret responsible for Leonard's seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love. Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the Novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.

Mary Barton, a Tale of Manchester Life

Mary Barton, a Tale of Manchester Life PDF Author: Elisabeth-Cleghorn Gaskell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 412

Book Description