George Eliot 2. Genre and Justice

In this third and final podcast, Dr Catherine Brown discusses the popularity of George Eliot's work in the Victorian period, which led to her status as a sage and the steady accumulation of her wealth. Reviews of Eliot's work by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and F.R Leavis are included in this lecture, which traces the reception history of Eliot's texts in the Victorian period and beyond. Catherine Brown examines the development of the 'modernist smirk' which looked down at Victorian literature, and follows Eliot's work into the present moment, where she demonstrates the application of Eliot's novels in Deconstructionist and Marxist approaches; the link between Eliot's texts and Feminist theory; and the relation of Eliot's work to science.

The second lecture in the series on George Eliot considers how narrative justice operates in relation to the genres of comedy and tragedy, particularly in 'Adam Bede' and 'Daniel Deronda'. The lecture identifies the disproportionate amount of suffering experienced by the women in Eliot's fiction in comparison to the men; an issue which has long been a bone of contention for feminist critics. Dr Catherine Brown discusses Eliot's belief that one's happiness and contentment should always be qualified by the knowledge that, at any given moment, others are experiencing misery.

In this lecture Dr Catherine Brown brings her discussion to focus primarily upon Eliot's atypical novella 'The Lifted Veil' and her novel 'Middlemarch'. It notes the power and range of Eliot's intellect and her changing attitudes to the proper function and remit of the intellect and consciousness. The podcast focuses upon the act of perception in Eliot's fiction, and the presentation of observation as a means of generalising the behavior of others. Catherine Brown suggests that Eliot's use of the vocabulary of consciousness, which was not made popular until after her death, demonstrates that Eliot accepted a modern understanding of brain function.