George Eliot, European Novelist

ISBN-13: 9781409422341 / Angielski / Twarda / 2011 / 196 str.

John Rignall

Opis

Reading George Eliot as a European novelist among other European novelists, John Rignall explores her use of European travel, scenes and locations in her fiction and also places her novels in conversation with the work of other major European writers. Throughout the book, Rignall shows Eliot's engagement with the cultures of France and Germany, suggestively making the case that Eliot's novels belong to the tradition of the European novel that descends from Cervantes. Rignall develops the fundamental theme of Eliot's position as a European novelist in chapters that explore the significance of Eliot's first visit to Germany with G. H. Lewes, Eliot's ideas on the cultural differences between French and German writing, the incidental part travel plays in novels such as Daniel Deronda and Middlemarch, the role of European landscapes in her fiction, the dialogical relationship between Eliot and Balzac, comparisons between Middlemarch and Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and connections between the novels of Eliot, Gottfried Keller and Theodor Fontane. Daniel Deronda is examined both within the wider context of European Jewish life and as part of a tradition of French novels that harkens back to Balzac and anticipates Proust. Rignall's final chapter takes up Nietzsche's notorious criticism of Eliot in Twilight of the Idols, showing that Eliot, with her sceptical intelligence, insight into the essentially metaphorical nature of language, and grasp of modernity, has something in common with this philosophical iconoclast.

Spis treści

Acknowledgements, List of Abbreviations, Introduction, 1. The Importance of Europe, 2. ‘Electric’ France and ‘Old’ Germany, 3. The Idea of Travel, 4. European Landscapes and the Violence of History, 5. Balzac and ‘the delineation of quiet provincial life’, 6. Madame Bovary, Middlemarch, and the Dangers of Diffusion, 7. Gottfried Keller, Theodor Fontane and the Elegiac Strain, 8. European Culture and the Jewish Diaspora in Daniel Deronda, 9. Daniel Deronda and the French Novel, 10. Nietzsche and Anticipations of Modernism, Select Bibliography, Index

O autorze

John Rignall is Emeritus Reader at the University of Warwick and the editor of George Eliot and Europe (1997) and the Oxford Reader's Companion to George Eliot (2000).