George Eliot's Dialogue with John MiltonUniversity of Missouri Press, 2003 - 278 Seiten In George Eliot's Dialogue with John Milton, Anna K. Nardo details how Eliot reimagined Milton's life and art to write epic novels for an age of unbelief. Nardo demonstrates that Eliot directly engaged Milton's poetry, prose, and the well-known legends of his life--transposing, reframing, regendering, and thus testing both the stories told about Milton and the stories Milton told.In Romola and Middlemarch, Eliot's contemporary audience would immediately have recognized in her heroines' stories the plight of Milton's daughters--enlisted as readers for a blind poet and scholar. By evoking the well-known legends of Milton's life in these novels, Eliot places Milton in dialogue with himself in order to imagine new possibilities. In Romola, a daughter uses what she has learned from one Miltonic father to liberate herself from subjugation to the other, and in Middlemarch, Eliot tests Milton's fundamental assumptions about gender and knowledge by evoking, then reframing scenes from his life and his epic Paradise Lost.This strategy for establishing a dialogue with authoritative discourse, which Eliot evolved in midcareer, is complex and elegant. Eliot's first full-length novel, however, poses a direct challenge to the pastoral assumptions of Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso"--a challenge that she extends to the theology of Milton's epic of a lost pastoral paradise. In Adam Bede, Eliot summons Miltonic patterns into situations that expose their absence, leaving not the denial of these patterns, but their echo. Having separated Milton's characteristic patterns of choice from his theology, Eliot then began to experiment with transformations of the Miltonic hero. By reimagining the story of the virtuous Lady of Comus, Eliot discovers the possibility for a heroic deliverance for the beleaguered heroine of The Mill on the Floss. In Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda, she first characterizes a male protagonist as a Miltonic hero, and then confronts her female, rather than her male, protagonist with the trials faced by that hero.In these complex transformations, we see Eliot's strenuous and lifelong dialogue with Milton--a dialogue that liberated Eliot's imagination. The author shows that Eliot opens the authoritative discourse by and about Milton to new possibilities envisioned by a towering female intellect. Scholars of both seventeenth-century and nineteenth-century British literature, especially those specializing in Eliot or Milton, as well as theorists engaged in the ongoing debate about intertextuality, will find this book of great interest. |
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Seite 41
... passion In those shrouded eyes may be ; Ere their lightning glance is flashing , From the fatal bower I flee . Here , the foreign beauty gazes less upon a lovely youth than on a prophet- ic image of a heroic poet . Again , Angelina ...
... passion In those shrouded eyes may be ; Ere their lightning glance is flashing , From the fatal bower I flee . Here , the foreign beauty gazes less upon a lovely youth than on a prophet- ic image of a heroic poet . Again , Angelina ...
Seite 42
... passion into knightly ser- vice to his lady , or the preservation of the beloved's image as an eternal ideal , or a climb toward the beatific vision . Milton , however , allows the fulfillment of the erotic vision in Paradise , where ...
... passion into knightly ser- vice to his lady , or the preservation of the beloved's image as an eternal ideal , or a climb toward the beatific vision . Milton , however , allows the fulfillment of the erotic vision in Paradise , where ...
Seite 180
... passion , to lull her into passivity , and to employ rhetoric as persuasive as Comus's " false rules prankt in reason's garb " ( Comus 759 ) , Maggie answers with the Lady's retort to her tempter : " Thou canst not touch the freedom of ...
... passion , to lull her into passivity , and to employ rhetoric as persuasive as Comus's " false rules prankt in reason's garb " ( Comus 759 ) , Maggie answers with the Lady's retort to her tempter : " Thou canst not touch the freedom of ...
Inhalt
Testing the Ways of Milton in Middlemarch | 111 |
Eliots Challenge to Milton in Adam Bede | 135 |
The Freedom of My Mind | 166 |
Urheberrecht | |
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