Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-c4f8m Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T22:17:57.477Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

UNSPEAKABLE GEORGE ELIOT

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 May 2010

David Kurnick
David Kurnick*
Affiliation:
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The very idea of Victorian cosmopolitanism might at first glance seem an oxymoron. Historically bracketed by a Romanticism that took political inspiration from France and intellectual cues from Germany and by a modernism whose most prominent “English” personnel were largely from overseas, the Victorians can look decidedly parochial. The most incisive recent attempts to link cosmopolitan thinking to specific formal or stylistic innovations have tended to leave the Victorians out of the picture. A recent essay by David Simpson, for example, nominates what he terms the Romantic “historical-geographical epic” as a critically cosmopolitan genre – one whose barrage of footnotes ruptures the surface of the text and ensures that even in surveying the exotic Other, Romantic epics guarantee that “the pleasure of poetry sits uneasily but inescapably alongside the burden of critique” (150). On the modernist side, Rebecca Walkowitz's Cosmopolitan Style (2006) has compellingly excavated the links between a host of modernist experimental practices and the project of thinking creatively outside national boundaries – reaching the conclusion that “there is no critical cosmopolitanism without modernist practices” (18). Neither Simpson nor Walkowitz deals with the Victorians in depth, but a certain idea of nineteenth-century realism hovers as the implicit contrast to the genres and practices they catalogue.

Type
Articles
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , September 2010 , pp. 489 - 509
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Adorno, Theodor W. “Words from Abroad.” Trans. Nicholsen, Shierry Weber. Notes to Literature. Ed. Tiedmann, Rolf. Vol. 1. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. 185–99.Google Scholar
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Heller-Roazen, Daniel. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Trans. Heller-Roazen, Daniel. New York: Zone Books, 1999.Google Scholar
Anderson, Amanda. The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001.Google Scholar
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006.Google Scholar
Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics. London: Routledge, 1993.Google Scholar
Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Bersani, Leo. The Culture of Redemption. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blair, Kirstie. Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Boucicault, Dion. The Octoroon. Selected Plays of Dion Boucicault. Ed. Parkin, Andrew. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic UP of America, 1987. 135–90.Google Scholar
Buzard, James. Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005.Google Scholar
Campbell, Matthew. “Poetry in the Four Nations.” A Companion to Victorian Poetry. Ed. Cronin, Richard, Chapman, Alison, and Harrison, Antony H.. Malden: Blackwell, 2002. 438–56.Google Scholar
Charnon-Deutsch, Lou. The Spanish Gypsy: The History of a European Obsession. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2004.Google Scholar
Duncan, Ian. “George Borrow's Nomadology.” Victorian Studies 41.3 (Spring 2008): 381–403.Google Scholar
Eagleton, Terry. The English Novel: An Introduction. Malden: Blackwell, 2005.Google Scholar
Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. 1876. London: Penguin, 1995.Google Scholar
Eliot, George. The George Eliot Letters: 1862–1868. Ed. Haight, Gordon S.. Vol. 4. New Haven: Yale UP, 1955.Google Scholar
Eliot, George. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. 1871–1872. Ed. Ashton, Rosemary. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994.Google Scholar
Eliot, George. The Spanish Gypsy. 1868. Ed. van den Broek, Antonie Gerard. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008.Google Scholar
Grossman, David. Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel. Trans. Haim Watzman. London: Jonathan Cape, 1993.Google Scholar
Haight, Gordon S.George Eliot: A Biography. 1968. New York: Penguin, 1985.Google Scholar
Hertz, Neil. George Eliot's Pulse. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.Google Scholar
Hutchinson, Stuart, ed. George Eliot: Critical Assessments. 4 vols. Robertsbridge: Helm Information, 1996.Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. “The Experiments of Time: Providence and Realism.” The Novel: Volume 2: Forms and Themes. Ed. Moretti, Franco. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. 95–127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mayall, David. Gypsy Identities, 1500–2000: From Egipcyans and Moon-Men to the Ethnic Romany. London: Routledge, 2004.Google Scholar
McKay, Brenda. George Eliot and Victorian Attitudes to Racial Diversity, Colonialism, Darwinism, Class, Gender, and Jewish Culture and Prophecy. Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen, 2003.Google Scholar
Mignolo, Walter. “The Many Faces of Cosmo-Polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism.” Cosmopolitanism. Ed. Sheldon Pollock, Carol A. Breckenridge, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. 157–87.Google Scholar
Moretti, Franco. “Serious Century.” The Novel, Volume 1: History, Geography, and Culture. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. 364–400.Google Scholar
Mufti, Aamir R.Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Nord, Deborah Epstein. Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807–1930. New York: Columbia UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Picker, John M. “George Eliot and the Sequel Question.” New Literary History 37.2 (2006): 361–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prins, Yopie. “Victorian Meters.” The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry. Ed. Bristow, Joseph. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 89–113.Google Scholar
Ragussis, Michael. Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Said, Edward. The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage, 1979.Google Scholar
Semmel, Bernard. George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silberstein, Laurence J.The Post-Zionism Debates: Knowledge and Power in Israeli Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999.Google Scholar
Simpson, David. “The Limits of Cosmopolitanism and the Case for Translation.” European Romantic Review 16.2 (1995): 141–52.Google Scholar
Sollors, Werner. Neither Black nor White yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trumpener, Katie. “The Time of the Gypsies.” Identities. Ed. Appiah, Kwame Anthony and Gates, Henry Louis Jr., Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. 338–79.Google Scholar
Tucker, Herbert F.Epic: Britain's Heroic Muse, 1790–1910. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walkowitz, Rebecca. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia UP, 2006.Google Scholar