George Eliot, Scientific Materialism and Literary Form: Some Relfections on Felicia Bonaparte\u27s Will and Destiny

Felicia Bonaparte\u27s study of Eliot\u27s fiction, Will and Destiny: Morality and Tragedy in George Eliot\u27s Novels, was published in 1975. I read it rather quickly towards the end of the 1970s because at the time I was working on a study of Eliot of my own and inevitably my attention was somewhat focused on whether there was going to be any overlap with my book. Since Bonaparte\u27s book argued strongly that Eliot was intellectually committed to empiricism and scientific rationality and mine attempted to bring out her relation to aspects of Romanticism, I believed at the time there was little common ground between the two books and I therefore did not need to engage seriously with it. Having read Will and Destiny more recently with much fuller attention, it now seems to me a major study of Eliot and that this has not been sufficiently acknowledged by later critics. Glancing at recommendations for further reading in the many editions of Eliot\u27s novels that are currently available, Will and Destiny is seldom listed. Bonaparte\u27s later study, The Tryptych and the Cross, which focuses solely on Romola, has rightly been widely recognized by critics with a serious interest in that novel as a critical tour de force. Will and Destiny should also be an essential critical text for readers of Eliot. What has perhaps led to the comparative neglect of Will and Destiny is that Bonaparte, one of the most unashamedly intellectual of Eliot\u27s critics, is so unequivocal in identifying her with scientific materialism. In the book\u27s Introduction Bonaparte writes: It was largely the empiricists, who themselves saw the need for some moral authority, who attempted to build a new system out of the new truths, who argued that science was not a threat to morality but a new and stronger foundation for what must become modem ethics. Eliot too was an empiricist. She too believed that science must be the basis of the morality of the future. And, like John Stuart Mill and August Comte, she found in science the answer to both relativism and scepticism. For it was science, Eliot held, not God that provided an inflexible authority for moral law. \u2

Review of Modernizing George Eliot: The miter as Artist, Intellectual, Proto-Modernist, Cultural Critic

This distinguished work by a major Eliot scholar is the product of decades of reading, writing and reflection on her fiction and thought. It brings together in revised, homogenized form a series of essays from 1972 to the present day, including new material; and further, it engages with and amplifies two of Newton\u27s earlier monographs on Eliot, as well as his collection of essays by other critics on Eliot utilizing modem literary theory. Despite dealing with complex philosophical ideas, Newton\u27s writing is clear and lucid throughout, bringing to light new insights without the unnecessary jargon that occasionally taints modem criticism. Newton also considers nineteenth-century criticism, most usefully that of Lewes, making connections also with Austen and Scott and drawing fascinating parallels between the plots of Little Dorrit and Daniel Deronda: he places Eliot above these three writers as an artist, however. Despite some blemishes this comprehensive monograph demonstrates the radical nature of Eliot\u27s intelligence, her innovative experiments with literary form and her status as \u27both artist and ... intellectual. [T]he two are not separable\u27 (69; emphasis added). Newton firmly establishes Eliot\u27s relevance for the twenty-first century - her affinities with writers from Yeats and Joyce to Derrida and Levinas, and with modernist and post-modernist ideas. Use of post-structuralist criticism helps tease out subversive sub-texts, highlighting Eliot\u27s intense scepticism and the range of her thinking in ethics, politics and philosophy. Newton places Eliot in the literary canon alongside Dante, Milton and Goethe, high - and probably merited - praise indeed. This work can come across as a sustained defence of Eliot against her detractors, but it offers considerably more than this. Placing Eliot so high on her pedestal - an action to which the present writer must also plead guilty - may invite a repetition of early-twentieth-century attempts by envious writers to push her off that lofty perch: the \u27half malicious\u27 critics after her death, like George Meredith, referred to by Virginia Woolf in her centenary article, who \u27gave point and poison to the arrows of thousands incapable of aiming them so accurately, but delighted to let fly\u27. There has also been much disparagement of Eliot\u27s work on ideological grounds, of course. Raising an artist so high also creates a tendency to dwarf her peers. Newton thus, in reaction to assertions that Eliot is less \u27feminist\u27 than a writer like Charlotte Bronte, cites Pauline Nestor\u27s assessment of Jane Eyre as simply a \u27heroine of fulfilment\u27 - \u27a psychological fantasy of the extraordinary ... assurance of Jane\u27s ego, \u27 markedly at odds with the childhood circumstances that produced it. Such a fantasy is diametrically opposed to Eliot\u27s commitment to psychological veracity\u27 (n. 14, 197). Yet Bronte\u27s novels can also be seen as life \u27experiments\u27. Thus Lucy Snowe in Villette, subject to early trauma, is alienated, neurotic and prone to breakdowns

Modernizing George Eliot

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. George Eliot's work has been subject to a wide range of critical questioning, most of which relates her substantially to a Victorian context and intellectual framework. This book examines the ways in which her work anticipates significant aspects of writing in the twentieth and indeed twenty first century in regard to both art and philosophy. This new book presents a series of linked essays exploring Eliot's credentials as a radical thinker. Opening with her relationship to the Romantic tradition, Newton goes on to discuss her reading of Darwinism, her radical critique of Victorian values and her affiliation with the modernists. The final essays discuss her work in relation to Derridean themes and to Bernard Williams' concept of moral luck. What emerges is a very different Eliot from the conservative figure portrayed in much critical literature

Narration in Middlemarch Revisited

In a previously published article entitled \u27The Role of the Narrator in George Eliot\u27s Novels\u27,1 I attempted to defend her narrator (particularly in regard to Middlemarch) from a variety of critical attacks. The main points of my argument were: (I) that the narrator should not be identified with Eliot herself as it often is but is a persona with a tone of voice separate from the author and thus both integrated into the fiction and central to its structure; (2) form and realism were reconciled by the fact that the narrator was represented as a historical novelist writing a novel about people and situations that were real for him (or her), the narrator not being gender specific after Adam Bede; (3) the narrator\u27s knowledge of what is going on in the minds of the characters does not indicate Godlike omniscience but is rather a historical novelist\u27s reconstruction of their inner lives using techniques and devices associated with the novel as a literary genre; (4) the formal organization of the novels, such as parallelism between characters and situations, does not imply that reality in itself has immanent form; (5) the narrator does not disguise the fact that he (or she) has a point of view in relation to ethical, philosophical and political questions and that this shapes his (or her) representation of reality; (6) narration must always be interpretation. I still broadly agree with these points but there are some issues in regard to narration in Eliot that still need to be addressed, and again I shall focus mainly on Middlemarch. The terms \u27reliable\u27 and \u27unreliable\u27 are common in the theory of narrative. Is Eliot\u27s narrator \u27reliable\u27 in that the reader is expected to accept and trust the narrator\u27s representation of reality? What if the reader or some readers disagree with the narrator\u27s judgements, and of course the narrator in Middlemarch is exceptionally \u27intrusive\u27? Does this make the narrator \u27unreliable\u27 for these readers? Dorothea Barrett in her book Vocation and Desire: George Eliot\u27s Heroines accepts that Eliot intends her narration to be \u27reliable\u27 but finds the narrator a conservative figure and refuses to accept what she sees as the conservative ideology being promulgated by this narrator. Her solution to the problem is to identify this conservative narrator with \u27Marian Lewes\u27 but to discern a more radical ideology in the subtext of the novel which she attributes to the artist \u27George Eliot\u27, who remains in contact at an unconscious level with the radicalism of the earlier self of the author. In effect then the narration becomes \u27unreliable\u27 even if Eliot as author at a conscious level did not intend it to be: \u27Marian Lewes clearly intends to recommend [submissiveness], but the texts themselves subvert her intention\u27

Modernizing George Eliot

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. George Eliot's work has been subject to a wide range of critical questioning, most of which relates her substantially to a Victorian context and intellectual framework. This book examines the ways in which her work anticipates significant aspects of writing in the twentieth and indeed twenty first century in regard to both art and philosophy. This new book presents a series of linked essays exploring Eliot's credentials as a radical thinker. Opening with her relationship to the Romantic tradition, Newton goes on to discuss her reading of Darwinism, her radical critique of Victorian values and her affiliation with the modernists. The final essays discuss her work in relation to Derridean themes and to Bernard Williams' concept of moral luck. What emerges is a very different Eliot from the conservative figure portrayed in much critical literature

Review of George Eliot, Judaism and the Novels

Saleel Nurbhai and K. M. Newton break new ground with this consideration of George Eliot\u27s exploitation of Jewish mysticism and mythology in fiction written before the novel that obviously promotes that tradition, Daniel Deronda. In their introductory chapter, Nurbhai and Newton posit the radical theory that the figure of the \u27golem\u27, or unformed mass, which is central to Jewish mythology is also a significant presence in all of Eliot\u27s work, beginning with Adam Bede. But they venture even further than this large hypothesis concerning Eliot\u27s work, suggesting that much of the \u27golemish\u27 character of her novels is based on her knowledge of Goethe\u27s Faust, Carlyle\u27s Sartor Resartus and Mary Shelley\u27s Frankenstein, each of which, they argue in turn, is profoundly influenced by the Jewish myth of the golem. The figure of the golem thus is seen as central to Romantic and nineteenth-century European humanist literature, as well as to Eliot\u27s work. Noting that Daniel Deronda has often been read as having failed to achieve the realism of Middlemarch or The Mill on the Floss, Nurbhai and Newton propose instead that we might gain by reading the earlier novels as preliminary movements toward what is much more definitively presented in Daniel Deronda. This is an enterprising and, I think, entirely valid reversal of the critical tradition that reads Daniel Deronda as a falling-off from the earlier works, a novel that can be divided into two symmetrical and oppositional \u27halves\u27, the one representing the English half as corrupt and dying and the other the Jewish half as inspired, vigorous and prophetic. Nurbhai and Newton argue that Eliot aspires \u27to alter the boundaries of realism\u27, and that \u27the mystical and mythological embodiment of these human truths could be exploited artistically and enable the realist novel to take on layers of meaning in the manner of major works of the past, such as in epic, poetry or tragic drama\u27 (24). Indeed, one has only to look to the works of Eliot\u27s slightly older contemporary, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, to see the same kind of experimentation with pushing the limits of \u27realism\u27 and \u27epic’. Aurora Leigh, Barrett Browning\u27s \u27novel-in-verse\u27, attempts to combine social and psychological realism with epic form, infused with classical and Christian mythology. Eliot\u27s interesting difference here, however, is that she appears to have come to prefer the much lesser known mythology of that despised race in England, the Jews. How did she come by this preference

Increased yield stability of field-grown winter barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) varietal mixtures through ecological processes

Crop variety mixtures have the potential to increase yield stability in highly variable and unpredictable environments, yet knowledge of the specific mechanisms underlying enhanced yield stability has been limited. Ecological processes in genetically diverse crops were investigated by conducting field trials with winter barley varieties (Hordeum vulgare), grown as monocultures or as three-way mixtures in fungicide treated and untreated plots at three sites. Mixtures achieved yields comparable to the best performing monocultures whilst enhancing yield stability despite being subject to multiple predicted and unpredicted abiotic and biotic stresses including brown rust (Puccinia hordei) and lodging. There was compensation through competitive release because the most competitive variety overyielded in mixtures thereby compensating for less competitive varieties. Facilitation was also identified as an important ecological process within mixtures by reducing lodging. This study indicates that crop varietal mixtures have the capacity to stabilise productivity even when environmental conditions and stresses are not predicted in advance. Varietal mixtures provide a means of increasing crop genetic diversity without the need for extensive breeding efforts. They may confer enhanced resilience to environmental stresses and thus be a desirable component of future cropping systems for sustainable arable farming

Patellar cartilage volume of the back leg versus the higher loaded front leg in current elite male english cricket fast bowlers

Patellar cartilage volume of the back leg versus the higher loaded front leg in current elite male english cricket fast bowler

Life-Course Individual and Neighborhood Socioeconomic Status and Risk of Dementia in the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Neurocognitive Study

We examined associations of individual-and neighborhood-level life-course (LC) socioeconomic status (SES) with incident dementia in the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities cohort. Individual-and neighborhood-level SES were assessed at 3 life epochs (childhood, young adulthood, midlife) via questionnaire (2001-2002) and summarized into LC-SES scores. Dementia was ascertained through 2013 using cognitive exams, telephone interviews, and hospital and death certificate codes. Cox regression was used to estimate hazard ratios of dementia by LC-SES scores in race-specific models. The analyses included data from 12,599 participants (25% Black) in the United States, with a mean age of 54 years and median follow-up of 24 years. Each standard-deviation greater individual LC-SES score was associated with a 14% (hazard ratio (HR) = 0.86, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.81, 0.92) lower risk of dementia in White and 21% (HR = 0.79, 95% CI: 0.71, 0.87) lower risk in Black participants. Education was removed from the individual LC-SES score and adjusted for separately to assess economic factors of LC-SES. A standard-deviation greater individual LC-SES score, without education, was associated with a 10% (HR = 0.90, 95% CI: 0.84, 0.97) lower dementia risk in White and 15% (HR = 0.85, 95% CI: 0.76, 0.96) lower risk in Black participants. Neighborhood LC-SES was not associated with dementia. We found that individual LC-SES is a risk factor for dementia, whereas neighborhood LC-SES was not associated