Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Woloch, Alex
• Anderson, Amanda
• Shaw, Harry E

Titel

Daniel Deronda: Late Form, or after Middlemarch

Ist Teil von

• A Companion to George Eliot, 2013, p.166-177

Ort / Verlag

Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Quelle

Wiley Online Library All Obooks

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The reverberating formal deviance of Daniel Deronda's opening is only heightened by its explicit thematic proximity to George Eliot's own previous novel: “Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress”. Like the novel as a whole, the first line of Daniel Deronda is at once deliberately reminiscent of Middlemarch (in its immediate aesthetic focus on the female protagonist) and radically dissimilar. In this way, the opening of Daniel Deronda — in addition to foregrounding its own experimental narrative energies—inaugurates the problem of the text's relationship to its immediate precursor, Middlemarch. The reach or “grasp” of Daniel Deronda—following in the wake of Middlemarch's expansive and synthetic narrative—makes it an exemplary instance of novelistic “late style,” at once extending, merely recapitulating, and straining against the novelist's own previous works.