From Author to Text: Re-reading George Eliot's Romola

by Caroline Levine (Editor, Contributor), Mark W. Turner (Editor, Contributor), Shona Elizabeth Simpson (Contributor)

This study shifts the critical emphasis from canonical author to her uncanonical text - from George Eliot to "Romola" - and so broadens the range of interpretive possibilities while bringing them into sharper focus. Eliot scholars have largely neglected the historical complexity of "Romola", though it is a novel rich in political and textual issues. Among the issues explored here are the domestic politics of marriage, the relationship between narrative and epistemology, the materiality of the text, the novels relation to narratives of martyrdom, and the gendering of space.

217 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1998

Reviews

[Lizzie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of literary criticism essays about the novel Romola . There is a sense in the literary studies world that Romola is the unloved child of George Eliot's works. I know almost nothing about that, but every critic mentions it, so it must be true! Strangely, it was a little easier to find single-subject book-length criticism for this than for The Mill on the Floss.

So anyway these critics are reviving Romola. Which is nice. I like that novel, so it's nice to read appreciative analysis of it. But because all the pieces here were written completely independently, there's a lot of repetition. They sort of couch that in an idea of "convergences," but, y'know. Also it's repetitive. I did a lot of skimming through this, both for that reason and just to seek out parts relevant to the topics I'm interested in.

The collection also favors a critical style that I just don't like reading that much of. There's a lot of phallic this and womb that and "no return inside the place of origin is possible unless you have a penis," which, how does that line even get into an article about literature. Why do they write this way? I don't care if you think you're a radical scholar. It's not subtext! It's, I don't know, untext. This is why some people don't like lit crit.

(And this is why I am a terrible literature student. I like Romola! I like Stephen Guest! I don't like pretending everything is having sex with everything else and that's what the whole story's about!)

Anyway, the parts of the essays that talked about things that actually happen in the book were nice. I got the most out of Turner's, Simpson's, and Corner's pieces, though several of them have theses that are a bit obscure.

Happily, there is a style of criticism that I do really enjoy reading, and not surprisingly, it's the most Goodreads-like: sound like a person, tone down the psychospeak, and talk about what is really there on that page in front of you, and why it matters.

Goodreads, don't ever change. (*cries*)