Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Markovits, Stefanie
• Anderson, Amanda
• Shaw, Harry E

Titel

Scenes of Clerical Life and Silas Marner: Moral Fables

Ist Teil von

• A Companion to George Eliot, 2013, p.91-104

Ort / Verlag

Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Wiley-Blackwell Online Books - All Titles (includes Withdrawn titles)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Scenes of Clerical Life and Silas Marner, the two works that bookend George Eliot's “early” period, have much in common. Both are short in form‐the first a collection of three inter‐related stories and the second a novella‐distinctive for that reason alone given Eliot's general reputation as a writer of massive novels. Both deal thematically with questions of suffering, confession, and redemption, questions that arise in the context of anthropologically‐oriented explorations of the state of contemporary religious belief within small provincial or rural communities. And both are fictions of memory, deeply imbued with personal recollection. Yet for all their realism, both works came to their author in what might be called visionary moments. Indeed it is striking that with Silas Marner, the story to which F. R. Leavis long ago affixed the tag of “moral fable”, realism grows out of the initial romantic vision, and not the other way around.