Academic literature on the topic '1819-1880 Mill on the Floss'

George Eliot (1819-1880), famous British Victorian novelist, has illustrated many great fictions that one of them is The Mill on the Floss in which Maggie Tulliver, as the key character, lives in a family in which she has been discriminated against by her family members and even other people in the society because of the blackness of her eyes and hair, and her dark skin. People know her as an evil girl because of the blackness that she owns. But oppositely, Maggie tries to change their negative views to her by being kind and having good behavior. This paper has an analytic review on this character in this novel to explore her personality, behavior, and responsibility and the reactions of her family and other characters to Maggie.

Over the past two decades, studies of the Victorian novel have been enriched significantly by a growing body of scholarship looking to the literature and letters of the period to affirm for the twenty-first century the theoretical and practical value of liberal conceptualizations of critical detachment and communicative decision-making procedures. In the process, the works of George Eliot (1819–1880) have come to be understood not only as modeling forms of critical detachment and rational decision-making but also as important contributors to what Amanda Anderson has identified as “the emergence of the [Habermasian] public sphere in Enlightenment Europe, a historical condition in which critique, argument, and debate inform developing political practices and institutions,” which “helped to consolidate … the legitimating force of public opinion and the rule of law, the successor to now delegitimated forms of absolute sovereignty.” However, I will argue here that Eliot's early writing in particular demonstrates a distinct lack of faith in the power of liberalism and its political procedures and that Eliot's early work in fact exposes the illiberal tendencies embedded in these procedures. Rather than asserting the authority of the public sphere, Eliot's important early novelsAdam Bede(1859) andThe Mill on the Floss(1860) consistently look beyond themselves, so to speak, to a providential authority that exceeds the tenets of realism in their efforts to resolve conflict and provide closure to the novels. For each novel, aesthetic coherence is secured not through “critique, argument, and debate” but through recourse to metaphysics and to extrasocial and/or extraprocedural decisions. In the following pages I align this phenomenon in Eliot's early writing with the controversial German legal scholar Carl Schmitt's concept of the exception in order to argue that, by appealing to the logic of providence to resolve their most intractable legal and ethical problems, these early novels in fact demonstrate Eliot's awareness of the practical limitations of proceduralism as a legitimate decision-making instrument.

The Mill on the Floss, by Victorian novelist George Eliot, is a polylinguistic novel in Bakhtine's sense of the word in that it integrates the linguistic diversity of the society which it depicts. This novel published in 1860 was translated six times into French but never enjoyed a great reception in France. We examine three translations in this thesis: the first is by Francois D'Albert-Durade (1863), the second is by Lucienne Molitor (1957) and the last is by Alain Jumeau (2003).
D'Albert-Durade's translation evacuates the linguistic diversity in order to shape the novel to the requirements of the target literary polysystem. Molitor, by homogenising the eliotian prose, turns the canonised English novel into a French popular novel. Jumeau, for his part, by rehabilitating the peasant sociolect in his translation, marks the beginning of a rehabilitation movement of George Eliot in France. This study, through the analysis of the voice of a few key characters, attempts to follow the French "translative journey" of The Mill on the Floss.

Este trabalho tem como objetivo analisar o conceito de autoria no contexto da obra de George Eliot. Para realizá-lo, definiram-se dois aspectos relevantes da atividade do autor. O primeiro deles é sua existência empírica, situada dentro de determinadas práticas, como apontado por Martha Woodmansee, Michel Foucault, Marisa Lajolo e Regina Zilberman. O segundo, seu funcionamento intratextual, como instância discursiva, destilado das teorias enunciativas de Emile Benveniste e das proposições teóricas de Wayne Booth, Umberto Eco e Wolfgang Iser. A partir dessas elaborações, foram desenvolvidas as análises, de um lado, da trajetória de Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) e seu papel como escritora do final do século XIX, e, de outro, do romance The Mill on the Floss, obra de 1860, na qual se percebe o autor George Eliot em funcionamento. Pode-se notar, através da reconstrução da vida da autora, sua reflexão própria sobre o significado da prática da autoria como missão social. É também notável, através de seu romance, a atuação de uma figura autoral que organiza o texto e encaminha a interpretação de seu leitor para determinadas direções.
This work’s objective is to analyze the concept of authorship in the context of George Eliot’s production. In order to do so, two relevant aspects of the author’s activity were defined. The first one is its empirical existence, located within certain practices, as pointed by Martha Woodmansee, Michel Foucault, Marisa Lajolo and Regina Zilberman. The second one, its intratextual operation, as a discoursive instance, distilled from Emile Benveniste’s enunciative theories and from the theoretical propositions of Wayne Booth, Umberto Eco and Wolfgang Iser. These elaborations allowed the development of two analyses: on one hand, of Mary Ann Evans’ (George Eliot’s) trajectory and her role as a late nineteenth century writer, and, on the other, of the novel The Mill on the Floss (1860), in which George Eliot’s authorship is perceived at work. It is noticeable, through the reconstruction of the author’s life, her own reflection on the meaning of authorial practice as a social mission. It is also remarkable, through her novel, the performance o an author figure which organizes the text and directs its reader’s interpretations to determined directions.

The thesis will examine the influence of Biblical literature on some of the novels of George Eliot. In doing so it will consider the following aspects of Eliot criticism: current theoretical debate about the use of midrash; modes of discourse and narrative style; prophetic language and vision; the influence of Judaism and Jewish exegetical methods on Adam Bede, "The Lifted Veil", The Mill on the Floss, Felix Holt, and Daniel Deronda. Literary critics have, for a long time, been interested in the influence of the Bible and Biblical hermeneutics on literature and the extent to which Biblical narratives and themes are used typologically and allegorically in fiction has been well researched. In this regard, the concept of midrash is not a new one in literary theory. It refers both to a genre of writing and to an ancient Rabbinic method of exegesis. It has, however, been given new meaning by literary critics and theoriticians such as Frank Kermode, Harold Bloom, and Jacques Derrida. In The Genesis of Secrecy, Kermode gives a new nuance to the word and demonstrates how it may be used to read not only Biblical stories but secular literature as well. It is an innovative, self-reflexive, and intricate hermeneutic processs which has been used by scholars such as Geoffrey Hartman and Sanford Budick, editors of Midrash and Literature, a seminal work in this thesis. Eliot's interest in Judaism and her fascination with religion, religious writing, and religious characters are closely connected to her understanding of the novelist's role as an interpreter of stories. In this regard, the prophetic figure as poet, seer, and interpreter of the past, present, and future of society is of special significance. The thesis will investigate Eliot's reinterpretation of this important Biblical type as well as her retelling of Biblical stories. It will attempt to establish the extent to which Eliot's work may be called midrash, and enter the current debate on how and why literary works have been and can be interpreted. It will address the questions of why Eliot, who abjures normative religious faith, has such a profound interest in the Bible, how the Bible serves her creative purposes, why she is interested in Judaism, and to what extent the latter informs and permeates her novels.