Résumés
Abstract
Mr. Brooke fails to become an elected political representative, but he nevertheless functions as a representative of Middlemarch society’s dominant mode of abstraction. Brooke’s comic idiom of “that sort of thing,” “that kind of thing,” and other variations of the word “thing” may be taken as a paradigm for George Eliot’s style throughout Middlemarch. Brooke parodies how characters and the narrator employ a grammar of things to articulate their relationships both to what they value in the material world and to their own interiority. I ascribe this grammar of things to what I call an “epistemology of character” because Eliot uses the same grammar of things to generate complex subjectivity within fully developed characters like Dorothea and Ladislaw as she does to describe scientific, conventional, religious, commercial, and physical realities.
Parties annexes
Works Cited
- Adams, James Eli. “Gyp’s Tale: On Sympathy, Silence, and Realism in Adam Bede.” Dickens Studies Annual 20 (1991): 227-242.
- Arata, Stephen. “On Not Paying Attention.” Victorian Studies 46.2 (Winter 2004): 193-205.
- Arnold, Jean. “Cameo Appearances: The Discourse of Jewelry in Middlemarch.” Victorian Literature and Culture 30.1 (2002): 265-88.
- Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. 1869. Ed. J. Dover Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.
- Auerbach, Nina. “Dorothea’s Lost Dog.” Middlemarch in the 21st Century. Ed. Karen Chase. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. 87-106.
- Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Ed. Donald Gray. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001.
- Bacon, Francis. Novum Organum with Other Parts of the Great Instauration. 1620. Trans. Peter Urbach and John Gibson. Chicago: Open Court, 1994.
- Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 1983. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.
- Cottom, Daniel. Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
- Dames, Nicholas. The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 2007.
- Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. 1859. Ed. Richard Maxwell. New York: Penguin, 2003.
- Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. 1853. Eds. George Ford and Sylvère Monod. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977.
- Duncan, Ian. Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007.
- Eliot, George. Adam Bede. 1859. Ed. Stephen Gill. New York: Penguin, 1980.
- Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. 1876. Ed. Terence Cave. New York: Penguin, 1995.
- Eliot, George. Essays of George Eliot. Ed. Thomas Pinney. New York: Columbia UP, 1963.
- Eliot, George. Middlemarch. 1872. Ed. Bert G. Hornback. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.
- Eliot, George. “The Natural History of German Life.” Westminster Review n. s. 19 (July 1856): 51-56; 71-72.
- Eliot, George. The Writings of George Eliot. Ed. J. W. Cross. 25 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1907-08. Rpt. New York: AMS P, 1970.
- Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. “Negotiating Middlemarch.” Middlemarch in the 21st Century. Ed. Karen Chase. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. 107-131.
- Farina, Jonathan. “‘The Mighty Commonwealth of Things’: Deep Characters of Abstraction in The Excursion.” The Wordsworth Circle 39.1/2 (Winter/Spring 2008): 11-15.
- Fielding, Henry. The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling. Ed. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely. New York: Penguin, 2005.
- Flint, Kate. “The Materiality of Middlemarch.” Middlemarch in the 21st Century. Ed. Karen Chase. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. 65-86.
- Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1994.
- Gallagher, Catherine. “George Eliot: Immanent Victorian.” Representations 90 (Spring 2005): 61-74.
- Gill, Stephen. Wordsworth and the Victorians. Clarendon: Oxford UP, 1998.
- Graver, Suzanne. George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory and Fictional Form. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.
- Humphreys, A. R. “The Eternal Fitness of Things: An Aspect of Eighteenth-Century Thought.” Modern Language Review 42.2 (April 1947): 188-98.
- Jeffrey, Francis. “On Wordsworth’s The Excursion.” On the Lake Poets. Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth. Poole, England: Woodstock Books, 1998. 1-30.
- Keats, John. John Keats: Complete Poems. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Cambridge: Harvard Belknap, 2003.
- Knoepflmacher, U. C. “Middlemarch: An Avuncular View.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30.1 (June 1975): 53-81.
- Levine, George. “George Eliot’s Hypothesis of Reality.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 35.1 (June 1980): 1-28.
- Levine, George. The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.
- Lewes, George Henry. Problems of Life and Mind. 2 vols. London: Trübner, 1874.
- Lewes, George Henry. “Mr. Darwin’s Hypotheses.” Fortnightly Review n. s. 3 and 4 (1868): 353-73; 611-28; 61-80; 492-509.
- Lynch, Deidre Shauna. The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998.
- Michie, Helena. Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.
- Nunokawa, Jeffrey. The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994.
- Pocock, J. G. A. “The Mobility of Property and the Rise of Eighteenth-Century Sociology.” Virtue, Commerce, History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985. 103-24.
- Potkay, Adam. “Wordsworth and the Ethics of Things.” PMLA 123.2 (March 2008): 390-404.
- Schoenfield, Mark. The Professional Wordsworth: Law, Labor, and the Poet’s Contract. Athens, Georgia: U of Georgia P, 1996.
- Shaw, Harry E. Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999.
- Shuttleworth, Sally. George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.
- Smith, Jonathan. Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1994.
- Stephen, Leslie. George Eliot. London: Macmillan, 1902.
- Stewart, Garrett. Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.
- Tennyson, Alfred. Tennyson’s Poetry. Ed. Robert W. Hill, Jr. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999.
- Trollope, Anthony. The Eustace Diamonds. 1871. Ed. Stephen Gill and John Sutherland. New York: Penguin, 2004.
- Trollope, Anthony. The Small House at Allington. 1864. Ed. Julian Thompson. New York: Penguin, 1991.
- Wordsworth, William. The Poems. Ed. John O. Hayden. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale UP, 1977.
- Wormald, Mark. “Microscopy and Semiotic in Middlemarch.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 50.4 (March 1996): 501-24.