To step back from the last book of Middlemarch to the first. Eliot’s story opens with the general expectation among her friends and family that Dorothea will marry Sir James Chettam, the eligible and hearty if rather dim young baronet. This, of course, does not happen. Instead she becomes betrothed...

1. Eliot’s Double Mirror

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Adam Roberts (16 sept. 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Many of the chapter epigraphs in Middlemarch are quoted from specifically attributed sources: ‘Shakespeare’, ‘Old Song’ and so on. Others come without attribution, and in these cases Eliot herself is the author—a snatch of poetry, or an excerpt from an Elizabethan-sounding play, which she is passing...

Introduction

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Adam Roberts (16 sept. 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

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 t...

7. Epigraphy : Beginnings and Ends

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Adam Roberts (16 sept. 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

It might be thought perverse, in a book explicitly about the use of epigraphs in Middlemarch, to have waited so long to quantify the specific lineaments of Eliot’s epigraphy in the novel. There are, though, reasons why such work belongs at the end rather than the beginning. An epigraph precedes a ch...

Postscript. the Flute inside the Bell

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Adam Roberts (16 sept. 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Middlemarch’s thirty-first chapter opens with a conversation between Lydgate and Rosamond about Dorothea. Lydgate that evening spoke to Miss Vincy of Mrs. Casaubon, and laid some emphasis on the strong feeling she appeared to have for that formal studious man thirty years older than herself.‘Of cour...

About the Team

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Adam Roberts (16 sept. 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Alessandra Tosi was the managing editor for this book. Adele Kreager performed the copy-editing and proofreading. Anna Gatti designed the cover. The cover was produced in InDesign using the Fontin font. Luca Baffa typeset the book in InDesign and produced the paperback and hardback editions. The tex...

4. Hypocrisy and the Judgment of Men

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Adam Roberts (16 sept. 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

The middleness of Middlemarch is a moral as well as an existential quantity, a matter of ethics as both mediated and medial. The novel’s twinned mirrors situate questions of honesty or mendacity, and Eliot’s characters middle themselves somewhere between moral puritanism on the one hand—Dorothea’s o...

6. Myth, Middlemarch and the Mill. Out in Mid-Sea

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Adam Roberts (16 sept. 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

The epigraph to chapter 44 reads as follows: I would not creep along the coast, but steer Out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars. This little couplet is about Dorothea leaving behind the shore-hugging life she has had with Casaubon and charting a more adventurous and exciting (sexual) course. Or a...

3. Lydgate Winces : Character and Realism

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Adam Roberts (16 sept. 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

I would like to talk a little more about middles. Middlemarch is a medium place, and Middlemarch a medium novel. ‘Medium’ means both middle (in a statistical, but also a general sense) and also environment, surround, that inside which we subsist. For biologists a medium is a nutrient solution for th...

5. Ladislaw

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Adam Roberts (16 sept. 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

© 2021 Adam Roberts, CC BY 4.0. https://doi.org/10.11657/OBP.0249.05 It is up to us, as readers, how we choose to pronounce Will Ladislaw’s surname. We might assume that it rhymes its final syllable with ‘coleslaw.’ Then again, we could note the clues as to his family provenance that unobtrusively a...

Middlemarch

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Adam Roberts (16 sept. 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

In Middlemarch, George Eliot draws a character passionately absorbed by abstruse allusion and obscure epigraphs. Casaubon’s obsession is a cautionary tale, but Adam Roberts nonetheless sees in him an invitation to take Eliot’s use of epigraphy and allusion seriously, and this book is an attempt to d...

Complicity, Past and Present: Portrayals of Involvement in Mass Violence and Terror in Documentary Fiction

Billets de blog

Forum Transregionale Studien (4 juin 2024)

Billets de blog

By Juliane Prade-Weiss One of the puzzling questions about Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine and other conflicts is why people participate in, support, or condone mass violence[1] when it appears, for observers, so glaringly wrong. Reasons for becoming complicit with violence against civilians vary wi...

Restoring the ‘Georgian House’: Architecture, Politics, and Identity in 1970s Edinburgh

Articles

James Legard (1 juin 2023)

Articles

La restauration par le National Trust for Scotland du n°7 Charlotte Square en vue de la création d’un musée de la Ville Nouvelle de l’époque géorgienne constituait une reconstitution plus ou moins fidèle d’une maison conçue par Robert Adam et située au centre d’un ensemble urbain néoclassique majeur...

Restoring the ‘Georgian House’: Architecture, Politics, and Identity in 1970s Edinburgh

Articles

James Legard (1 juin 2023)

Articles

Baïes à l'encre et au crayon : Charles-Louis Clérisseau dans les Champs Phlégréens

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Léa Narès (1 mars 2023)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Parmi les visiteurs du Grand Tour dans les Champs Phlégréens se trouve Charles-LouisClérisseau (1721-1820), peintre et architecte français, qui séjourna en Italie entre 1749 et1767. Il collabora avec les frères Robert Adam (1728-1792) et James Adam (1732-1794),architectes britanniques, à la réalisat...

La science-fiction littéraire

Billets de blog

Langlet Irène (23 nov. 2022)

Billets de blog

Séminaire "Littérature et savoirs XX-XXIè s." M2, S4, 24h CM - Enseignante : Irène Langlet Argument Nul ne prétend plus ignorer ce qu’est la science-fiction ; il se lit même ici et là que le problème aujourd’hui serait de savoir ce qui n’est pas de la science-fiction. Toutefois, les formes médiatiqu...

A history of deaf and hearing interpreters in France from the high Middle Ages to the present day: Chapter 4

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Yann Cantin et al. (18 juil. 2022)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Today, in the Deaf community in France, we have three very distinct professions: interpreters, translators, and intermediators. Interpreters between French and French Sign Language (LSF) are hearing. Interpreters between two sign languages are deaf. Translators into French sign language are deaf; an...

A history of deaf and hearing interpreters in France from the high Middle Ages to the present day: Chapter 4

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Yann Cantin et al. (18 juil. 2022)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages