In Middlemarch, George Eliot famously warns readers not to see themselves as the centre of their own world, which produces a ‘flattering illusion of concentric arrangement’. The scholarly contributors to Antipodean George Eliot resist this form of centrism. Hailing from four continents and six countries, they consider Eliot from a variety of de-centred vantage points, exploring how the obscure and marginal in Eliot’s life and work sheds surprising light on the central and familiar. With essays that span the full range of Eliot’s career—from her early journalism, to her major novels, to eccentric late works such as Impressions of Theophrastus Such—Antipodean George Eliot is committed to challenging orthodoxies about Eliot’s development as a writer, overturning received ideas about her moral and political thought, and unveiling new contexts for appreciating her unparalleled significance in nineteenth-century letters.
About the Contributors
List of Texts and Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Margaret Harris and Matthew Sussman
Chapter 1: George Eliot Elsewhere
Fionnuala Dillane
Chapter 2: Before Scenes of Clerical Life: Eliot’s 1854-57 Travelogues as Poetic Practice
Julia Kuehn
Chapter 3: George Eliot and ‘the Case of Wagner’: Fabrications and Speculations
Robert Dingley
Chapter 4: The Mill on the Floss and the Novel in Bengal
Sneha Kar Chaudhuri and Debashree Dattaray
Chapter 5: A Roar of Sound: George Eliot on Sympathy and the Problem of Other Minds
Moira Gatens
Chapter 6: Sympathy and Alterity: The Ethical Sublime in Romola
Thomas Albrecht
Chapter 7: Reading the Riot Act: The Case of Felix Holt, the Radical
Helen Groth
Chapter 8: Middlemarch and Reform: Looking Back versus ‘The Thick of It’
Joanne Wilkes
Chapter 9: The Grounds of Exception: Liberal Sympathy and Its Limits in Daniel Deronda
and C.H. Pearson’s National Life and Character
Tim Dolin
Chapter 10: Counter Impressions: Ambiguous Habits in Impressions of Theophrastus Such
Penny Horsley
Chapter 11: Impressions of Theophrastus Such and the Limitations of Depth
Matthew Sussman
Works Cited
Index
Biography
Margaret Harris is Challis Professor of English Literature Emerita, The University of Sydney. She edited The Journals of George Eliot (with Judith Johnston, 1998) and George Eliot in Context (2013). Her other publications include studies of Victorian fiction, especially that of George Meredith.
Matthew Sussman is Senior Lecturer in English at The University of Sydney. He is the author of Stylistic Virtue and Victorian Fiction: Form, Ethics, and the Novel (2021), as well as articles on Anthony Trollope, Henry James, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Matthew Arnold.
“This is a stimulating collection which demonstrates the vitality of George Eliot scholarship in the Antipodes and beyond, and it is at the same time a tribute to the inexhaustible richness of her writing….a handsomely produced work for which the editors and the publisher should be congratulated.”
-John Rignall, University of Warwick (p95: The George Eliot Review 2023, No. 54)
