UID:
almafu_9961565606502883
Format:
1 online resource (x, 410 pages)
Edition:
First edition.
ISBN:
9780268202637
,
9780268202668
,
0-268-20263-X
,
0-268-20266-4
Content:
"René Girard's mimetic theory opens up ways to make sense of the tension between the progressive politics of George Eliot and the conservative moralism of her narratives. In this innovative study, Bernadette Waterman Ward offers an original rereading of George Eliot's work through the lens of René Girard's theories of mimetic desire, violence, and the sacred. It is a fruitful mapping of a twentieth-century theorist onto a nineteenth-century novelist, revealing Eliot's understanding of imitative desire, rivalry, idol-making, and sacrificial victimization as critical elements of the social mechanism. While the unresolved tensions between Eliot's realism and her desire to believe in gradual social amelioration have often been studied, Ward is especially adept at articulating the details of such conflict in Eliot's early novels. In particular, Ward emphasizes the clash between the ruthless mechanisms of mimetic desire and the idea of progress, or, as Eliot stated, "growing good"; Eliot's Christian sympathy for sacrificial victims against her general rejection of Christianity; and her resort to "Nemesis" to evade the systemic injustice of the social sphere. The "angels" in the title are characters who appear to offer a humanist way forward in the absence of religious belief. They are represented, in Girardian terms, as figures who try to rise above the snares of the mimetic machine to imitate Christ's self-sacrifice but are finally rendered ineffectual. Very few studies have tackled Eliot's short fiction and narrative poetry. Eliot's Angels gives the short fiction its due, and it will appeal to the community of scholars in mimetic and literary theory, Victorianists, and students of the novel"--
Note:
Includes index.
,
Introduction -- Mimesis and George Eliot's Fiction -- Mimetic Anthropology: Eliot's Early Years -- The Intellectual Development of Mary Ann Evans -- George Eliot's Clerical Life -- The Magic of Sympathy in Adam Bede -- Hell in Other People: Mimesis and The Lifted Veil -- Death and the River: The Mill on the Floss -- The Interruptions: "Brother Jacob" and Silas Marner -- Romola, Full-Fledged Mimetic Angel -- Foiled Tragedy and Felix Holt -- Myth and the Artist: The Spanish Gypsy, The Legend of Jubal, and Armgart -- The Apocalyptic Angel of Middlemarch -- Satanic Masquerade: Daniel Deronda -- Mimesis in Theophrastus Such.
Additional Edition:
Print version: Waterman Ward, Bernadette Eliot's Angels Notre Dame, IN : University of Notre Dame Press,c2022 ISBN 9780268202644
Language:
English
Keywords:
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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