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E-book Middlemarch : Epigraphs and Mirrors

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Penilaian

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This short book aims to turn a modest, one might even think trivial, literary labour into something more substantial, going beyond one particular novel into broader questions of novel-writing, character and narrative. My starting point is tracking down those allusions and quotations in Middlemarch that have hitherto gone unidentified by scholars. Most of these quotations are located in the chapter epigraphs that George Eliot provides throughout, citing other writers or confecting her own pastiche blank verse or prose. Unpacking these epigraphs as well as the other quotations, and exploring their relationship to the body of the text, frames or grounds a broader discussion of the novel. It seems to me that these epigraphs, taken as a distinctive part of a larger network of quotations and allusions in the text, contain important resonances for the way Eliot’s novels generate their meanings. For, indeed, the way the novel as such generates its meaning.It may be that my opening paragraph comes across as defensive. We wouldn’t want that. It was Eliot’s practice in all her novels to add epigraphs to her chapters, some quoted from and identified as by particular authors, others created by herself in the style of a poet or an ‘Old Play’. She was by no means the first author to do this, of course; popularised by Walter Scott, it is a practice that goes back into the eighteenth-century. It could be argued that the textual practice of heading a chapter with a short quoted text apes the practice of the popular sermon, just as the related habit of larding the novelistic text with quotations apes a conversational practice that does the same thing, one widespread enough that it could itself be satirised—by Scott, and others—as a mode of pretentious pedantry indicative of a lack of imagination, or even of an overcompensation for discursive unconfidence. Abel ‘Dominie’ Sampson in Scott’s second novel Guy Mannering (1815)—one of the most popular individuals from Scott’s vast gallery of characters—is a key figure here. Sampson is a man ‘of low birth’, whose capacity for learning was encouraged by parents (who hoped ‘that their bairn, as they expressed it, “might wag his pow in a pulpit yet”’) prepared to scrimp and save to secure their son’s education. But he proves too shy and awkward to be a preacher—a ‘tall, ungainly figure, [with] taciturn and grave manners, and some grotesque habits of swinging his limbs and screwing his visage while reciting his task’, he ends up as tutor in Godfrey Bertram’s stately home, Ellangowan.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

928.21 ROB m

Penerbit

London : Open Book Publishers., 2021

Deskripsi Fisik

163 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781800641600

Klasifikasi

928.21

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Person in Literature Biography in England

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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