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J.
Johnston.
George
Eliot and the Discourses of Medievalism.
Brepols,
Jan 2006.
Making the Middle Ages (MMAGES) 6.
160 x
240 mm.
X+252pp.
Publisher's
recommended price
Hardback
ISBN
2503507735, €60.00
In George Eliot's last two
novels, Middlemarch (1871-72)
and Daniel Deronda (1876),
she abandons the realism she had explored and articulated so carefully,
most famously in Adam Bede,
'a faithful account of men and things', for an unprecedented return to
'cloud-borne angels, [...] prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors'. This
study addresses Eliot's exploitation of Victorian medievalism by
considering the way in which she utilizes the discourses of
medievalism, both for their potential for subversiveness and their
potential for mediation, to affirm that change is possible socially,
culturally, and politically, in her modern contemporary world. The
various medieval discourses are revealed as interstices within what
initially appears to be a continuation of the realism of her earlier
novels. They permit political and cultural readings of a different, and
often unexpected, kind to the realist bourgeois values of novels like Adam Bede, and to a lesser extent, Felix Holt. These political and
cultural readings reveal a more determined, more obvious feminist and
socialist polemic in her two last and possibly greatest novels.
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