Browse Documents (20 total)
- Tags: Adam Bede
Sort by:
Adam's Voice
Tags: Adam Bede, William Hall
The Egyptian Sorcerer in Adam Bede
Many scholars and critics have discussed the symbolic significance of the famous opening sentence of Adam Bede and related it to George Eliot's own narrative method, but the precise workings of the Egyptian sorcerer's magical exercise in divination…
Tags: Adam Bede, Tapan Kumar Mukherjee
Review of Reading for Our Time: 'Adam Bede' and 'Middlemarch' Revisited by J. Hillis Miller
As his sub-title indicates, J. Hillis Miller is returning in his latest book to the study of George Eliot, bringing to bear on Adam Bede and Middlemarch the insight and erudition acquired in a long and distinguished career as a scholar and critic. He…
Tags: Adam Bede, John Rignall, Middlemarch, Review
Enter the Aunts
My title is taken from Chapter 7 of 'Book First' of The Mill on the Floss which describes the moment we first meet Aunts Glegg, Pullet and Deane in all their bustling, sharp-tongued, comic glory. The full title of the chapter is 'Enter the Aunts and…
Adam Bede and Emigration
Although emigration to settler colonies was a widespread phenomenon in mid nineteenth-century Britain, it is a theme to which George Eliot appears to give very little attention. Of all the works, Adam Bede is the novel which seems especially…
Tags: Adam Bede, Josephine McDonagh
Expressive Things in Adam Bede
A drop of ink is the first thing in the first sentence of George Eliot's first novel: 'With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance corner far-reaching visions of the past.' Like many objects in…
Tags: Adam Bede, Barbara Hardy
'Hetty had never read a novel': Adam Bede and Realism
It is not just the famous Chapter 17, 'In Which the Story Pauses a Little', which makes George Eliot's Adam Bede one of the first candidates for any discussion of the tenets and aims of nineteenth-century literary realism. The question is opened in…
Tags: Adam Bede, Rachel Bowlby
'Good teaching': Adam Bede and Education
George Eliot's commitment to teaching motivates her writing from the first. Like many of those whose thinking was shaped by early nineteenth-century evangelicalism, she saw education as a vital responsibility. In 1847, when she was twenty-eight years…
Tags: Adam Bede, Dinah Birch
Review of Broadview Edition of Adam Bede, edited by Mary Waldron
This Broadview edition of Adam Bede has a biographical and critical introduction, appropriately integrating G. H. Lewes into its discourse, and useful essays on some of the themes of the novel, - Religion, Love, Rank and Status. There are short…
Tags: Adam Bede, Graham Handley, Review
Adam Bede, adapted and directed by Geoffrey Beevers, Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond
Adam Bede is not easily adaptable to the stage. Its structure is essentially narrative rather than dramatic, and much of its interest consists in the probing of moral issues and analysis of motive. A straightforward retelling of the plot without any…
Tags: Adam Bede, Ian Sutton, Theatre
Review of The Clarendon Edition of Adam Bede ed. Carol A. Martin
In a letter to G. H. Lewes of October 1858 John Blackwood contrasted his own discriminat-ing language of praise with the 'abandon of expression' indulged in by what he terms 'the large hearted school of Critics,' and of course one sees his point, as…
Tags: Adam Bede, Review, Stephen Gill
The Idea of an English Gentleman: Mr Knightley and Arthur Donnithorne
My modest purpose in this essay is to develop the interesting suggestion of Ellen Moers in Literary Women that George Eliot's inspiration to write Adam Bede may well have lain in her attentive reading of Emma: that Adam Bede himself is the heroic and…
Tags: Adam Bede, David Bell
The Imaginary Vision in Adam Bede: Hetty's Mirrors and the Objet A
In October 1857, George Eliot began her first full-length major novel, Adam Bede. Having just completed her last 'scene' - 'Janet's Repentance' - from Scenes of Clerical Life, she decided to use a 'large canvas' for her next endeavour, an endeavour…
Tags: Adam Bede, Katrina Ruth
Adam Bede: Author, Narrator and Narrative
Readers of novels seem to have a natural, almost instinctive, tendency to perceive the voices of the author and the omniscient narrator as being one and the same. This tendency is even stronger when the narrator is blatantly intrusive, frequently…
Tags: Adam Bede, Cynthia Huggins
BBC Television's Film of Adam Bede
This adaption was not for the academic, the scholar or the purist. As none of these, I admit that, with reservations, I enjoyed the film. There were some very good things about it. The setting was very attractive (Stanway in the Cotswolds for much of…
Tags: Adam Bede, Kathleen Adams
The Triumph of Spirit Over Law: Free Will Versus Determinism in Adam Bede
One of the primary intellectual influences that shaped George Eliot's thought was positivism, or rather the various influence of positivistic philosophers such as Comte, Mill, Spencer, Feuerbach and Lewes, who each in his own way subscribed to an…
Tags: Adam Bede, William H. Klein
Theatre Review: Adam Bede at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond
I remember repeatedly falling asleep over the book at university ... [the adaptor] sensibly excludes ... many interminable passages of description and lofty authorial comment; and he has unearthed more humour in the novel than I dreamt was possible…
Tags: Adam Bede, Review, Rosalind Holt, Theatre
Adam Bede and Riehl's "Social-political Conservatism"
George Eliot's Adam Bede is seen frequently to be a good, but flawed novel, an interesting precursor to the much finer Middlemarch and other later novels. U. C. Knoepflmacher, in Georqe Eliot's Earlv Novels: The Limits of Realism, considers that,…
Tags: A. G. Van Den Broek, Adam Bede
Study Group Notes: Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede
The Study Group began by reading Middlemarch early in 1981, then, in the second half of the year, we went back to George Eliot’s first efforts in fiction and read Scenes of Clerical Life. We are reading for pleasure, chiefly, so at the end of the…
