Abstract
Many critics have seen Eliot as a tragic novelist, especially in The Mill on the Floss. Though the tragic is an essential concept for Eliot, to be sustainable in the modern post-Darwin era it is argued that she believes it must be revised and even democratized. Time is a crucial element in the novel’s revisionary concept of the tragic. Negative criticism of the Mill has been so sustained because that has not been sufficiently taken into account in previous criticism. How the Mill’s revisionary concept of tragedy is played out both philosophically and artistically is explored through a detailed analysis of the central relationships in the text.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
See Steiner , The Death of Tragedy, especially 291.
- 2.
For further discussion of the relation between the tragic and the undecidable, see K. M. Newton , Modern Literature and the Tragic, especially 4–5, and for a broader discussion of tragedy and the novel, see K. M. Newton , ‘Tragedy and the Novel’, in Thomas Hardy in Context, ed. Mallett, 122–31.
- 3.
The Journals of George Eliot, eds Harris and Johnston (Cambridge, 76).
- 4.
George Eliot and her Readers, eds Holstrom and Lerner, 47, 48.
Bibliography
A. S. Byatt (ed.), ‘Introduction to George Eliot,’ in The Mill and the Floss (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979).
Felicia Bonaparte, Will and Destiny: Morality and Tragedy in George Eliot’s Novels (New York: New York University Press, 1995).
Elizabeth Ermarth, ‘Maggie Tulliver’s Long Suicide,’ Studies in English Literature 14 (1974): 587–601.
Avrom Fleishman, George Eliot’s Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Barbara Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (London: Athlone Press, 1959).
Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston (eds.), The Journals of George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
John Holstrom and Laurence Lerner (eds.), George Eliot and Her Readers: A Selection of Contemporary Reviews (London: The Bodley Head, 1966).
K. M. Newton, Modern Literature and the Tragic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008).
———, ‘Tragedy and the Novel,’ in Thomas Hardy in Context, ed. Phillip Mallett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 122–31.
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).
George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber and Faber, 1963).
Anthony Trollope and Barchester Towers (eds.), Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1996).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Newton, K.M. (2018). The Mill on the Floss and the Revision of Tragedy. In: George Eliot for the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91926-3_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91926-3_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-91925-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-91926-3
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)