Juliette Atkinson – författare

Gold! - his own gold - brought back to him as mysteriously as it had been taken away!Falsely accused of theft, Silas Marner is cut off from his community but finds refuge in the village of Raveloe, where he is eyed with distant suspicion. Like a spider from a fairy-tale, Silas fills fifteen monotonous years with weaving and accumulating gold. The son of the wealthy local Squire, Godfrey Cass also seeks an escape from his past. One snowy winter, two events change the course of their lives: Silas's gold is stolen and, a child crawls across his threshold. Combining the qualities of a fable with a rich evocation of rural life in the early years of the nineteenth century, Silas Marner (1861) is a masterpiece of construction and a powerful meditation on the value of communal bonds in a mysterious world.

George Eliot repeatedly stressed the aesthetic and ethical importance of viewing subjects from different perspectives: The Oxford Handbook of George Eliot presents fifty-two perspectives on this major nineteenth-century writer. Together, the chapters provide the most wide-ranging collection of essays on Eliot's life and works published to date. While providing fresh perspectives on the important themes running through Eliot's works, the volume is distinctive in placing a concern with literary form at its heart. Part I questions longstanding conceptions of Eliot as a figure isolated by scandal by exploring her personal and intellectual relationships with her contemporaries. Part II focuses on Eliot's close engagement with earlier poets, dramatists, and novelists, as well as with painting, sculpture, and music, and in so doing probes Eliot's interest in the nature of influence itself. Part III explores the full range of Eliot's unpublished and published works: chapters on each of the novels make a renewed case for the centrality of Eliot's works to current scholarly debates about nineteenth-century literature; other chapters offer ways into texts that have either been neglected (such as the novellas and poetry) or more often mined for biographical and historical contexts than given a close reading (such as the notebooks, manuscripts, letters, and journals). Part IV gives close scrutiny to those aspects of literary form which characterise Eliot's writing, particularly her preoccupation with genre and her handling of voice, both that of her narrators and her characters. Part V assesses the complexity of Eliot's legacy for later writers, concluding with five shorter essays which tackle the nature and impact of the enduring cultural status of Middlemarch as a (often declared the) 'great English novel'.

In 1836, John Wilson Croker, having immersed himself in dozens of contemporary French novels, warned his readers that 'she who dares to read a single page of the hundred thousand licentious pages with which the last five years have indundated society, is lost for ever.' It has become common to build an opposition between the attitudes towards fiction held in prudish Victorian England and permissive 19th-century France. The lack of a full-length study of 19th-century Anglo-French literary relations means, however, that the rejection of French novels has been greatly exaggerated. French Novels and the Victorians sheds new light on these relations by exploring the enormous impact of French fiction on the Victorian reading public. The book considers the many different ties built between the two countries in the publishing industry, identifying how French novels could be accessed and by whom, as well as who promoted and who resisted the importation of Continental works in England and why. The book reflects on what 'immorality' meant to both critics and the readers they sought to warn, and how the notion was subjected to scrutiny through censorship debates as well as the fictional representations of readers. It also tackles the contemporary preoccupation with literary influence, and explores how the extensive circulation of French fiction in England affected the concept of a 'national' literature. In addition to highlighting the cultural importance of novelists such as Sand, Balzac, and Dumas, this book uncovers the networks and mediums that enabled French novels to cross the Channel, and looks at how the concept of 'the French novel' was elaborated, interpreted, and challenged.

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, InspiringGeorge Eliot pushed the boundaries of fiction and of Victorian society. She was an extraordinary woman whose unconventional life meant that she was judged harshly by family, friends, and strangers. Eliot wanted to draw attention to the feelings and motivations of ordinary people, so that we might feel more generous towards each other. But human beings are complex, and to capture that complexity Eliot drew on an astonishing range of philosophical, psychological, and scientific ideas. She hoped her work might do good, yet she was clear-eyed about the limits of both human sympathy and the novel. In this Very Short Introduction, Juliette Atkinson explores the ideas feeding Eliot's fiction and looks at the literary techniques - such as narrative voice, genre, imagery, structure, and syntax - that she used to embody them. These shape her recurrent themes: the stifling nature of gossip, the hardships experienced by commonplace individuals, the duty of practising fellow-feeling and the difficulty of doing so. Atkinson argues that George Eliot was a social outcast who became a sage, through the creation of some of the most influential novels ever written in English.ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.