George Eliot U.S. demonstrates the complex and reciprocal relationship between George Eliot's fiction and the writings of her major American contemporaries, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The book also traces Eliot's influence on subsequent American fiction. The introductory section raises methodological questions concerning influence and intertextuality and addresses the mutual reception of European and American social and cultural discourses in order to illuminate culturally motivated divergences and convergences in the authors' presentation of gender, race, and national and ethnic alterity. The book's main body discusses Eliot's and the American writers' depiction of domestic social discourses on gender, religion, and community, and analyzes their depiction of the cultural alterity of Italy. It also focuses on Eliot's and Stowe's different attitudes toward race (and nation building), and discusses the parallels between the kabbalistic passages of Daniel Deronda and American transcendentalist thought. and social life in works by later writers such as Cynthia Ozick and John Irving. Monika Mueller teaches American and English literature at the University of Cologne.

George Eliot’s writing process was meticulous in all of its phases, from manuscript to published text. Each of her extensive novels has a delicately crafted syntax, for she shaped her individual sentences as carefully as she wanted her public to read them. Building on the influence of Victorian psychological theory, this book explains how George Eliot consciously created subtle shocks within her grammar—reaching out to her readers beneath the levels of character and story—in her effort to inspire sympathetic response.

In the first half of the nineteenth century in England there was a strong interest in German literature and German scholarship. George Eliot studied German and German literature from the age of twenty. Her first publication, in 1846, was a translation of Friedrich Strauss's Das Leben Jesu; followed, in 1854, by the translation of Ludwig Feuerbach's Das Wesen des Christentums. That same year George Eliot left England with George Henry Lewes on her first visit to Germany. During the next three months they visited Frankfurt, Weimar and Berlin to collect material for Lewes's biography of Goethe. In this study, Gerlinde Röder-Bolton explores the impact of Goethe on George Eliot, whose elective affinity with Goethe was both ethical and artistic, and analyses George Eliot's responsiveness to Goethe's moral vision and the literary uses she makes of her familiarity with Goethe's work. George Eliot and Goethe: An Elective Affinity concentrates on The Mill on the Floss and Daniel Deronda, showing how the intertextual relationship with Die Wahlverwandtschaften holds the key to an understanding of the latter part of The Mill on the Floss, while the first part of Faust and Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre throw new light on Daniel Deronda. This study, with its close analysis of a range of works by George Eliot and Goethe, is essential reading for anyone interested in both or either of these authors or in Anglo-German literary relations.

The controversial British writer Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) is increasingly recognized as a major presence in early twentieth-century literature. This series of International Ford Madox Ford Studies was founded to reflect the recent resurgence of interest in him. Each volume is based upon a particular theme or issue; and relates aspects of Ford's work, life, and contacts, to broader concerns of his time. The present book is part of a large-scale reassessment of his roles in literary history. Ford is best-known for his fiction, especially The Good Soldier, long considered a modernist masterpiece; and Parade's End, which Anthony Burgess described as 'the finest novel about the First World War'; and Samuel Hynes has called 'the greatest war novel ever written by an Englishman'. But he was a prolific writer in many different modes, which include criticism of others' writing, and reminiscences of the many writers he had known. One of the most striking features of his career is his close involvement with so many of the major international literary groupings of his time. In the South-East of England at the fin-de-siècle, he collaborated for a decade with Joseph Conrad, and befriended Henry James, and H. G. Wells. In Edwardian London he founded the English Review, publishing these writers alongside his new discoveries, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis. After the war he moved to France, founding the transatlantic review in Paris, taking on Hemingway as a sub-editor, discovering another generation of Modernists such as Jean Rhys and Basil Bunting, and publishing them alongside Joyce and Gertrude Stein. He spent more time in America from the later 1920s, spending time with Southern Agrarians, and poets such as William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, and Robert Lowell. He was always a tireless promoter of younger writers, reading manuscripts and recommending them to publishers. This book takes Ford's 'literary contacts' to include such creative friendships, editorial involvements, and influential biographical encounters; and they form the most substantial, central section on 'Contemporaries and Confrères', covering figures like Proust, Carlos Williams, Rebecca West, Herbert Read, and Hemingway. But it also explores contacts with literary texts. The first section on 'Predecessors' considers the impact of Ford's reading of Trollope, George Eliot, and Turgenev. The final section discusses 'Successors' writers such as Graham Greene, Burgess, and A. S. Byatt, whose literary contacts with Ford have been as his admiring readers and eloquent critics. Ford has been described as 'a writer's writer'. This volume reveals how true that has been, and in how many ways, as it sheds new light on his relationships with other writers, both familiar and surprising. It includes two pieces published here for the first time: one by Ford himself, on Turgenev; the other a memoir about Ford by his contemporary, Marie Belloc Lowndes (the sister of Hilaire Belloc).

Presents a brief biography of George Eliot, critical views and plot summaries of four of her novels, and an index of themes and ideas.

James's narrative strategies are discussed in the context of the techniques employed by his literary predecessors. Illuminating comparisons are made with novelists such as Jane Austen and George Eliot, and particular attention is paid to the French novelist Flaubert, who was probably the most significant influence on James. The author examines James's stylistic devices in a selection of representative works from his early, middle, and late periods (Roderick Hudson, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Golden Bowl).

Latimer, the narrator of The Lifted Veil, possesses an uncanny ability to see into the minds of others and to divine the future, including the moment of his own death. The gift of being able to read the private thoughts and emotions of his fellow men soon becomes a curse to Latimer, for he is horrified by what he discovers. Afflicted by his burden of knowledge, he is driven to marry the cold-hearted coquette Bertha - the only person whose mind seems closed to him, until it is too late. This volume also includes George Eliot's only other short fictional work; the satirical fable Brother Jacob, in which the mercenary schemes of a devious confectioner are unconsciously thwarted by the childlike innocence of his 'idiot' brother.

An exploration of the consequences for literature of the suppression of ethical traditions.

"We think of the nineteenth century as an active age - the age of colonial expansion, revolutions, and railroads, of great exploration and the Great Exhibition. But in reading the works of Romantic and Victorian writers one notices a conflict, what Stefanie Markovits terms "a crisis of action." In her book, The Crisis of Action in Nineteenth-Century English Literature, Markovits maps out this conflict by focusing on four writers: William Wordsworth, Arthur Hugh Clough, George Eliot, and Henry James. Each chapter offers a "case-study" that demonstrates how specific historical contingencies - including reaction to the French Revolution, laissez-faire economic practices, changes in religious and scientific beliefs, and shifts in women's roles - made people in the period hypersensitive to the status of action and its literary co-relative, plot."--BOOK JACKET.