The Mill on the Floss (Routledge English Texts) - Softcover

Eliot, George

Softcover

ISBN 10: 041501316X ISBN 13: 9780415013161

Publisher: Routledge, 1991

Synopsis

In "The Mill on the Floss" George Eliot created her most passionate heroine - Maggie Tulliver. From childhood to "fallen" woman, the novel traces the history of its intelligent, vibrant and sensual heroine, showing ways in which she is both formed and yet thwarted and constrained by the small-minded provincial society in which she is reared. Through the detailed depiction of Maggie's childhood life and subsequent agonized relations with her beloved brother Tom, George Eliot offers an analysis of the conflicting demands and internalised contradictions experienced by middle-class women in Victorian culture. The main focus of Sally Shuttleworth's critical commentary rests on George Eliot's analysis of the social construction of gender in the novel, viewed in the light of her own ambivalent responses to the Victorian woman question. Shuttleworth unveils the imaginative wish-fulfilment which has fuelled much of the previous criticism of the novel, and points to the ways in which, both thematically and structurally, "The Mill on the Floss" challenges the implicit assumptions of realism upon which these criticisms have been based. This book should be of interest to students of English literature at all levels.

About this title

From the Publisher:

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From the Back Cover:

George Eliot had no peer when it came to finding the drama at the heart of normal lives, lived out in tandem with the slow, gigantic rhythms of nature itself. 'The Mill On The Floss' (1860), a story of the growth of the moral imagination in this young, sensitive heroine, Maggie Tulliver, restores to conditions of human existence that we can all recognize their actual originality and strangeness, and reveals once again how thoroughly, in the hands of a master like George Eliot, the art of fiction can satisfy our deepest mental and emotional cravings.

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 041501316X
• ISBN 13: 9780415013161
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 540
• Editor: Shuttleworth Sally