Karen Chase

The Magic and Mystery of Walt Disney World

Middlemarch is the prime example of George Eliot's dictum that "interpretations are illimitable," and in this collection of new essays Middlemarch is re-examined as an open text responsive to gaps and fissures, and as resistant to authority as it is to other fixed notions of identity, idealism, and gender. What does the novel omit, and how do the omissions shape what is there? How shall we understand the materiality of the text? What problems does it pose to adaptation? The novel's plasticity becomes a basis for investigation into the multiple forms of expressiveness, and a consideration of how we might plot the patterns linguistically, ideologically, even cinematically. New spaces emerge within character, place, and narrative; what seemed absent or inaccessible assumes shape and definition; Middlemarch remains "Victorian" but it is a Victorianism understood through the dual perspectives of the 19th and 21st centuries. Scholars of George Eliot and students of Victorianism will be engaged by the wide-ranging scope of these essays, which nonetheless build on each other to form a coherent narrative of critical reflections. If there is something for everyone in Middlemarch, there is also something compelling about each of the essays in this collection.

Middlemarch in the Twenty-First Century

Michael Levenson

Love of home life, the intimate moments a family peacefully enjoyed in seclusion, had long been considered a hallmark of English character even before the Victorian era. But the Victorians attached unprecedented importance to domesticity, romanticizing the family in every medium from novels to government reports, to the point where actual families felt anxious and the public developed a fierce appetite for scandal. Here Karen Chase and Michael Levenson explore how intimacy became a spectacle and how this paradox energized Victorian culture between 1835 and 1865. They tell a story of a society continually perfecting the forms of private pleasure and yet forever finding its secrets exposed to view. The friction between the two conditions sparks insightful discussions of authority and sentiment, empire and middle-class politics. The book recovers neglected episodes of this mid-century drama: the adultery trial of Caroline Norton and the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne; the Bedchamber Crisis of the young Queen Victoria; the Bloomer craze of the 1850s; and Robert Kerr's influential treatise, celebrating the ideal of the English Gentleman's House. The literary representation of household life--in Dickens, Tennyson, Ellis, and Oliphant, among others--is placed in relation to such public spectacles as the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill of 1848, the controversy over divorce in the years 1854-1857, and the triumphant return of Florence Nightingale from the Crimea. These colorful incidents create a telling new portrait of Victorian family life, one that demands a fundamental rethinking of the relation between public and private spheres.

A Public Life for the Victorian Family

The Spectacle of Intimacy

Just off busy Mehrauli -- Gurgaon Road in Delhi, India, the 16th-century Sufi court poet Jamali is buried in a tomb next to Kamali, of whom the printed matter says "identity unknown," but who helpful guides say, was the poet's lover. Little about them is known. Karen Chase envisions love and longing between the two, who according to Delhi's oral tradition were homosexual lovers. Others believe that Kamali was Jamali's wife, and some others believe that "Kamali" was Jamali's nom de plume. Over the reigns of Sikandar, Lodi, Babur and Humayun, Jamali's travels take him to Syria, Iran, Bhagdad, Ceylon, Mecca, Herat, Damascus, Palestine and Spain, making for many separations. The verse moves from Jamali's longing to Kamali's lament, re-creating the interplay between their passionate hearts.

A Tale of Passion in Mughal India

Jamali - Kamali

How does Victorian fiction represent personality? How does it express emotion and how does it imagine the mind? These questions stand at the centre of Eros and Psyche, first published in 1984. In examining how three authors – Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and George Eliot – depict the mind and organise emotion, Chase approaches their works as expressive structures, and analyses their struggle to accommodate rival imperatives in depicting personality: desire and duty, guilt and innocence, love and autonomy. The title begins with Brontë’s early Angrian tales, which introduce the problem that unifies the book: the attempt of Victorian fiction to escape the constraints of the romance mode, while assimilating its energies. There follow readings of The Pickwick Papers, Jane Eyre, Bleak House, and Middlemarch, in the light of such problems as confinement and exposure in Brontë, tragic doubt in Dickens, and the image of the moral mind in George Eliot.

The Representation of Personality in Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot

Eros and Psyche (Routledge Revivals)

Middlemarch in the Twenty-First Century fills a long overdue need for a re-evaluation of this classic text. In this collection of new essays prominent scholars address the timely questions which Middlemarch poses today, and they prepare the ground for the ongoing reconsideration of a great novel.

George Eliot

Paying much attention to the novel's intellectual and social context, this comprehensive introduction appraises it within nineteenth-century traditions of the novel in England and Europe and emphasizes the "Woman Question."

Karen Chase

About

Books

Join the club