Presents George Eliot's shorter poetry. This volume includes an introduction, which discusses Eliot's interest in poetry verse and its relation to her prose and prose fiction; her recurring themes and motifs; the poetry's critical reception and its value to modern readers.

Presents George Eliot's shorter poetry. This volume includes an introduction, which discusses Eliot's interest in poetry verse and its relation to her prose and prose fiction; her recurring themes and motifs; the poetry's critical reception and its value to modern readers.

Presents George Eliot's shorter poetry. This volume includes an introduction, which discusses Eliot's interest in poetry verse and its relation to her prose and prose fiction; her recurring themes and motifs; the poetry's critical reception and its value to modern readers.

Since the late twentieth century, there has been a strategic campaign to recover the impact of Victorian women writers in the field of English literature. However, with the increased understanding of the importance of interdisciplinarity in the twenty-first century, there is a need to extend this campaign beyond literary studies in order to recognise the role of women writers across the nineteenth century, a time that was intrinsically interdisciplinary in approach to scholarly writing and public intellectual engagement.

This collection brings together new articles by leading scholars who reappraise George Eliot in her bicentenary year as an interdisciplinary thinker and writer for our times. Here, researchers, students, teachers and the general public gain access to new perspectives on Eliot’s vast interests and knowledge, informed by the nineteenth-century British culture in which she lived. Examining Eliot’s wide-ranging engagement with Victorian historical research, periodicals, poetry, mythology, natural history, realism, the body, gender relations, and animal studies, these essays construct an exciting new interdisciplinary agenda for future Eliot studies.

The life story of the Victorian novelist George Eliot is as dramatic and complex as her best plots. This new assessment of her life and work combines recent biographical research with penetrating literary criticism, resulting in revealing new interpretations of her literary work. A fresh look at George Eliot's captivating life story Includes original new analysis of her writing Deploys the latest biographical research Combines literary criticism with biographical narrative to offer a rounded perspective

In Middlemarch, George Eliot famously warns readers not to see themselves as the centre of their own world, which produces a ‘flattering illusion of concentric arrangement’. The scholarly contributors to Antipodean George Eliot resist this form of centrism. Hailing from four continents and six countries, they consider Eliot from a variety of de-centred vantage points, exploring how the obscure and marginal in Eliot’s life and work sheds surprising light on the central and familiar. With essays that span the full range of Eliot’s career—from her early journalism, to her major novels, to eccentric late works such as Impressions of Theophrastus Such—Antipodean George Eliot is committed to challenging orthodoxies about Eliot’s development as a writer, overturning received ideas about her moral and political thought, and unveiling new contexts for appreciating her unparalleled significance in nineteenth-century letters.

The bestselling, prizewinning author of How to Live and At the Existentialist Café explores 700 years of writers, thinkers, scientists and artists, all trying to understand what it means to be truly human. If you are reading this, it’s likely you already have some affinity with humanism, even if you don’t think of yourself in those terms. You may be drawn to literature and the humanities. You may prefer to base your moral choices on fellow-feeling and responsibility to others rather than on religious commandments. Or you may simply believe that individual lives are more important than grand political visions or dogmas. If any of these apply, you are part of a long tradition of humanist thought, and you share that tradition with many extraordinary individuals through history who have put rational enquiry, cultural richness, freedom of thought and a sense of hope at the heart of their lives. Humanly Possible introduces us to some of these people, as it asks what humanism is and why it has flourished for so long, despite opposition from fanatics, mystics and tyrants. It is a book brimming with ideas, personalities and experiments in living – from the literary enthusiasts of the fourteenth century to the secular campaigners of our own time, from Erasmus to Esperanto, from anatomists to agnostics, from Christine de Pizan to Bertrand Russell, and from Voltaire to Zora Neale Hurston. It takes us on an irresistible journey, and joyfully celebrates open-mindedness, optimism, freedom and the power of the here and now—humanist values which have helped steer us through dark times in the past, and which are just as urgently needed in our world today. The bestselling, prizewinning author of How to Live and At the Existentialist Café explores 700 years of writers, thinkers, scientists and artists, all trying to understand what it means to be truly human.

This second edition, including some new chapters, provides an essential introduction to all aspects of George Eliot's life and writing. Accessible essays by some of the most distinguished scholars of Victorian literature provide lucid and often original insights into the work of one of the most important novelists of the nineteenth century.