Sympathy - Antipathy in Daniel Deronda

This essay argues that that, in her final novel, Daniel Deronda, Eliot uses her eponymous protagonist to simultaneously exemplify and problematize the type of sympathy she had championed from the 1850s. Sympathetic affinity in the novel works like original ‘occult’ sympathy, irresistibly connecting non-adjacent things, and matched in its force by sympathy’s original twin, antipathy. This essay investigates the novel’s antipathies, arguing that Eliot eschews meliorism and offers instead a brave glimpse into the obdurate forces of hatred and destructiveness that shadow our best selves

Introduction

Introduction to a special issue on George Elliott

Sexual selection, automata and ethics in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and Olive Schreiner's Undine and From Man to Man

This paper brings together two related areas of debate in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The first concerns how the courtship plot of the nineteenth-century novel responded to, and helped to shape, scientific ideas of sexual competition and selection. In The Mill on the Floss (1860), George Eliot strikingly prefigures Darwin's later work on sexual selection, drawing from her own extensive knowledge of the wider debates within which evolutionary theory developed. Maggie Tulliver's characterisation allows Eliot to explore the ethical complexities raised by an increasingly powerful scientific naturalism, where biology is seen to be embedded within morality in newly specific ways. The second strand of the paper examines the extension of scientific method to human mind and motivation which constituted the new psychology. It argues that there are crucial continuities of long-established ethical and religious ideas within this increasingly naturalistic view of human mind and motivation. The contention that such ideas persist and are transformed, rather than simply jettisoned, is illustrated through the example of Thomas Henry Huxley's 1874 essay on automata. Turning finally to focus on Olive Schreiner's Undine (1929) and From Man to Man (1926), the paper explores the importance of these persistent ethical and religious ideas in two novels which remained unpublished during her lifetime. It argues that they produce both difficulty and opportunity for imagining love plots within the context of increasingly assertive biological and naturalistic accounts of human beings

Allegory and animals in Olive Schreiner’s Undine : A Queer Little Child (1929)

Written and abandoned in the 1870s, and published posthumously in 1929, Undine: A Queer Little Child has remained on the margins of Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) studies, repeatedly dismissed as a juvenile and poor antecedent to The Story of An African Farm (1883), or deemed valuable primarily for its autobiographical content. This article redresses these schematic readings by analysing how Schreiner draws on allegorical forms in order to explore aspects of her burgeoning radicalism. Focusing on one of the main allegorical thrusts of the novel, provided by the zoomorphic and anthropomorphic animal characters that descend from mythical, fairytale, and Ancient Greek philosophical origins, it investigates how the protagonist’s metaphorically significant associations with animals relate to freethinking, feminist, and anti-imperialist ideas introduced by the novel. Undine thus undermines dominant nineteenth-century models of the “primitive” human or animal as less evolutionarily developed and without political platform, which can be seen to be a liberating move when the novel is read in dialogue with Jacques Derrida’s lectures on animals, and with other recent work in postcolonial ecocriticism

Adjunctive rifampicin for Staphylococcus aureus bacteraemia (ARREST): a multicentre, randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial.

BACKGROUND: Staphylococcus aureus bacteraemia is a common cause of severe community-acquired and hospital-acquired infection worldwide. We tested the hypothesis that adjunctive rifampicin would reduce bacteriologically confirmed treatment failure or disease recurrence, or death, by enhancing early S aureus killing, sterilising infected foci and blood faster, and reducing risks of dissemination and metastatic infection. METHODS: In this multicentre, randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, adults (≥18 years) with S aureus bacteraemia who had received ≤96 h of active antibiotic therapy were recruited from 29 UK hospitals. Patients were randomly assigned (1:1) via a computer-generated sequential randomisation list to receive 2 weeks of adjunctive rifampicin (600 mg or 900 mg per day according to weight, oral or intravenous) versus identical placebo, together with standard antibiotic therapy. Randomisation was stratified by centre. Patients, investigators, and those caring for the patients were masked to group allocation. The primary outcome was time to bacteriologically confirmed treatment failure or disease recurrence, or death (all-cause), from randomisation to 12 weeks, adjudicated by an independent review committee masked to the treatment. Analysis was intention to treat. This trial was registered, number ISRCTN37666216, and is closed to new participants. FINDINGS: Between Dec 10, 2012, and Oct 25, 2016, 758 eligible participants were randomly assigned: 370 to rifampicin and 388 to placebo. 485 (64%) participants had community-acquired S aureus infections, and 132 (17%) had nosocomial S aureus infections. 47 (6%) had meticillin-resistant infections. 301 (40%) participants had an initial deep infection focus. Standard antibiotics were given for 29 (IQR 18-45) days; 619 (82%) participants received flucloxacillin. By week 12, 62 (17%) of participants who received rifampicin versus 71 (18%) who received placebo experienced treatment failure or disease recurrence, or died (absolute risk difference -1·4%, 95% CI -7·0 to 4·3; hazard ratio 0·96, 0·68-1·35, p=0·81). From randomisation to 12 weeks, no evidence of differences in serious (p=0·17) or grade 3-4 (p=0·36) adverse events were observed; however, 63 (17%) participants in the rifampicin group versus 39 (10%) in the placebo group had antibiotic or trial drug-modifying adverse events (p=0·004), and 24 (6%) versus six (2%) had drug interactions (p=0·0005). INTERPRETATION: Adjunctive rifampicin provided no overall benefit over standard antibiotic therapy in adults with S aureus bacteraemia. FUNDING: UK National Institute for Health Research Health Technology Assessment

Love, Death and Money in Mashonaland: Olive Schreiner\u27s Trooper Peter Halket

When wars are fought, anxiety about sexual behaviour never seems far away. Will men behave like men on the battlefield? Or will they misbehave like men, and commit atrocities against soldiers or civilians - and even, perhaps, against women? Such worries surfaced in the English periodical press during the Boer War in a sharp exchange between the journalist and campaigner, W.T. Stead,1 and the writer Arthur Conan Doyle. In a piece entitled Methods of Barbarism (1901),2 Stead charged British troops with the sexual abuse and rape of unprotected Boer women made vulnerable by the British policy of destroying Boer homesteads. This latter policy was at the heart of the British response to Boer guerrilla tactics following defeats during 1900. Boer farms were providing a support system which their destruction was intended to break, while simultaneously demoralizing Boer combatants

The hidden romance of sexual science: eugenics, the nation and the making of modern feminism

Book synopsis: Sexology in Culture examines the impact of key writings by sexologists on English-speaking culture from the 1880s to the early 1940s. How influential a field was sexology during this period, and how much power did sexologists wield? What was the impact of their work on popular and official attitudes to sex? In this volume, Lucy Bland and Laura Doan have brought together leading historians of sex, cultural and literary critics, and scholars in gay, lesbian and queer studies, to reassess current debates on sexology in light of its history. Issues addressed include the relation of "sexual science" to the law, government policy, journalism, eugenical programmes, marriage and sex manuals, and literary representation. Other chapters map out new readings of transsexuality and bisexuality, and the centrality of race within sexological discourse. This book will be of interest to all those concerned with understanding modern sexual discourse in its historical context, and will be essential reading for researchers, teachers, and students interested in the history and study of sex