![]() ![]() The reconciliation of family and individual interests in Eliot’s fiction is the main focus of this essay, which offers fresh interpretations of 'Felix Holt', 'Middlemarch', and 'Daniel Deronda' in their theoretical and historical contexts. The Lifted Veil by George Eliot is an 1859 novella that departs sharply from the usual realism of the esteemed British author’s fiction. Published in 1859, it is set 60 years earlier in the fictional village of Hayslope, where a morally-upright carpenter named Adam Bede is in love with Hetty Sorrel, a pretty and self-absorbed dairymaid. Victorian Season: Lecture 5 George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859) In her first full-length novel, George Eliot offers a kind of manifesto for literary realism. A legal bestseller in its time, 'Ancient Law' expounded a theory of social evolution centring on the idea that the 'movement of progressive societies has hitherto been … from Status to Contract.' Maine’s status-contract model provided a framework for his readers to view customs of inheritance and succession in light of a binary social discourse that presented family interests (expressed juridically in terms of “status”) in opposition to individual interests (expressed as “contract,” the epitome of non-familial legal relations). Adam Bede is George Eliot ’s first full-length novel, and embodies the realist aims she would continue to develop over the course of her career. ![]() ![]() ![]() This article examines the intersections between jurisprudence and literature through a close reading of George Eliot’s last three novels in relation to Henry Sumner Maine’s 'Ancient Law: Its Connection With the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas' (1861). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |