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1 Agrégation 2020 George Eliot, Middlemarch (A selective bibliography by George

1 Agrégation 2020 George Eliot, Middlemarch (A selective bibliography by Georges Letissier – Nantes) Recommended Edition ELIOT, George. Middlemarch [1871-72]. Edited by David Carroll and David Russell. Third edition. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2019. Other useful edition: ELIOT, George. Middlemarch (1977). Edited by Bert G. Hornback. New York & London: A Norton Critical Edition, 2000. → Interesting background sources, letters from George Eliot to Sara Sophia Hennell, 9 October 1843, Barbara Bodichon, 26 December, 1860 and 15 February 1862. Extract from “The Natural History of German Life” (Westminster Review 66 – July 1856). Selected passages from “Amos Barton”, Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) and Adam Bede (1859), affording parallel, contrastive readings with Middlemarch. Quarry for Middlemarch – George Eliot called Quarry a small notebook that she used throughout her planning and writing of the novel. It contains precious background sources: the research the novelist conducted (on medicine, cell theory, historical events contemporary with the novel’s story, directions for plotlines and characterisation etc.) Among the contemporary reviews, two are especially worthy of interest: Henry James’s “George Eliot’s Middlemarch”, reprinted from Galaxy (March 1873) and Leslie Stephen’s “On Middlemarch”, from George Eliot, London : Macmillan, 1902. Also of interest, Bert G. Hornback’s “The Moral Imagination of George Eliot”, pp. 606-618. Many other editions of Middlemarch have of course been published in the anglophone world since the novel first came out in eight five-shilling parts, at two monthly intervals (Blackwood, London and Edinburgh, 1871-1872), followed by a four-volume edition selling for two guineas, or forty-two shillings (December 1872). A third revised and amended edition came out in a single volume (one-volume Cheap edition) at 7s. 6d. in May 1874. The 1874 Cheap edition was chosen as the basis for the text of the Clarendon edition (1986). See Joanne Shattock “Publishers and publication” and “Editons of George Eliot’s work”, in George Eliot in Context. Margaret Harris (ed.), Cambridge: C.U.P., 2013.  Translations and French Reception ELIOT, George. Middlemarch Paris: Gallimard – Folio Classique, 2005. Texte traduit et annoté par Sylvère Monod. L’édition Folio Classique reproduit en préambule la traduction de l’essai célèbre de Virginia Woolf, “George Eliot” (publié dans le Times Literary Supplement – 20 November 1919). La formule, bien connue désormais, selon laquelle le pouvoir d’Eliot “is at its highest in the mature Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people” a été citée d’innombrables fois ! La notice de Sylvère Monod qui suit la traduction est un modèle du genre, pp.1099-1110. 2 Three previous translations existed : Middlemarch, étude de la vie de la vie de province. Trad. M.-J.M. [this is the only signature], Paris : Calman-Lévy, 2 vols. 1890. Middlemarch. Trad. Albine Loisy, Paris: Plon, 1951. Middlemarch. Trad. Lucienne Molitor, Verviers, Gérard et Cie, coll. « Marabout Géant », 1953. For those interested in translation studies, Savoyane Henri-Lepage « Roman, digressions et traduction. Middlemarch en français », Érudit 20, Oct 26, 2007. ˂https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/ttr/2006-v19-n1-ttr1809/016659ar/abstract/˃ COUCH, John Phillip. George Eliot in France. A French Appraisal of George Eliot’s Writings: 1858-1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967. Primary texts of direct interest for the study of Middlemarch Apart from The Mill on the Floss (1860), which is usually well-known, and bears some distant resemblance with Middlemarch (sibling relationship, the life of a tightly-knit community and the contrasted destinies of two strong-willed female characters: Maggie Tulliver and Dorothea Brooke), the following works could be of some use: ELIOT, George. Scenes of Clerical Life (1858). New York and Oxford: O.U.P., 1988. It consists of three tales set in the Midlands featuring members of the clergy who probably already announce the likes of Humphrey Cadwallader, the Reverend Edward Casaubon or Camden Farebrother in Middlemarch. ELIOT, George. Adam Bede (1859). New York and Oxford: O.U.P., 1998. The topic of love renunciation is common to Camden Farebrother and Seth Bede, Adam’s brother. ELIOT, George. Felix Holt, The Radical (1866). New York and Oxford: O.U.P., 1998. In many respects the novel served as a preliminary exercise for the writing of Middlemarch, both are set in the time of the first Reform Bill and the themes of public opinion and chance discovery are also common to both, though they are played out more blatantly in Middlemarch. Translations by George Eliot (they are crucial to understand the ethic, and more widely, philosophical discourse underpinning Middlemarch). ELIOT, George. The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1846). Translation of David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu. Reprint, Mifflintown, PA : Sigler Press, 1994. Eliot became deeply involved with the “higher critics”, like Strauss, who believed that the Bible should be read as a historical document that is essentially a collection of myths. For Eliot the “grand fiction of belief” should not stifle the “intimate experience” of the spiritual and psychological life, which is unique to each individual. This deep-rooted conviction inflects her treatment of characters in Middlemarch. 3 ELIOT, George. The Essence of Christianity (1854). Translation of Ludwig Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums. Reprint, Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1989. What Eliot kept from Feuerbach is the idea that individuals should not be turned into abstractions. The essence of christianity is in benevolence, sympathy and love, qualities which are commonly held as Godly, but which in fact are innate qualities natural to man. Hence Feuerbach’s insistence on “sympathy”. Eliot is convinced that morality grows from our ability to imagine and understand another’s state of mind, this is why art and fiction count so much. The novelist may be seen as an “ethical naturalist”, i.e. one who believes it is possible to work out empirical means to derive ethical truths. The novel may be seen as a laboratory to achieve this aim collectively. ELIOT, George. Ethics. Translation of Baruch Spinoza. Ed. Thomas Deegan. Salzburg Studies in English Literature 102. Salzburg, 1981. Eliot translated from the Latin two books by Spinoza Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1843), a critique of biblical miracles. Spinoza argues in particular that interpreters of the Bible have made the Scriptures conform to assumptions and biases they have brought to them, rather then approaching them with impartiality. This hermeneutic stance hugely influences Eliot always wary of the risk of biased readings. Subsequently she translated Ethics – unpublished in her lifetime – an essay in which Spinoza attempts to ground morality in a non-religious, or at least non-theological, context. A rationalist, Spinoza believes in the importance of the intuitive apprehension of truth, in contradistinction with the endorsement of previously established, overarching doctrines. The Dutch philosopher asserts that there are three kinds of knowledge, the top-ranking ones being reason and above it intuition. The lowest form includes perception, imagination and opinion, which Spinoza refers to as “hearsay, or knowledge from mere signs.” For her part, Eliot adopts this grid of analysis when for example in Middlemarch she dismisses gossip as inadequate, unfounded knowledge. The Middlemarchers condemn Lydgate on empty assumptions, Eliot points out that the newly arrived doctor “is known merely as a cluster of signs for his neighbours’ false suppositions” (Chap. XV). Like Spinoza, she values intuition as the method of making moral judgments, she pleads for ethical intuitionism. This is clearly stated in The Mill on the Floss: “All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the man of maxims; because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy.” (Book VII, ch. 2, Oxford’s World Classic, 1998, p. 498). Essays, Journals, and Letters BYATT, A.S. and Nicholas WARREN, eds. George Eliot: Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings. Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1990.  HAIGHT, Gordon S., ed. The George Eliot Letters. 9 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954-78.** HARRIS, Margaret and Judith JOHNSON, eds. The Journals of George Eliot. Cambridge: C.U.P., 1998. 4 KITCHEL, Anna, ed. Quarry for Middlemarch. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U. of California P., 1950. (Also in Bert G. Hornback, A Norton Critical Edition 2000, see above).** LEWES, Charles Lee, ed. Essays and Leaves from a Notebook. London: William Blackwood, 1884. PINNEY, Thomas. ed. Essays of George Eliot. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963/New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. ——. “More Leaves from George Eliot’s Notebook.” Huntington Library Quarterly 29 (1966): 352-76. PRATT, John Clark and Victor A. NEUFELDT, eds. George Eliot’s Middlemarch Notebooks : A Transcription, Berkeley : U of California P., 1979. Biographies (selection) ASHTON, Rosemary. George Eliot: A Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1997(thorough and balanced, regarded by some critics as the best).  CROSS, John W. George Eliot’s Life as Related in her Letters and Journals, 3 vols. Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1885. Cambridge: C.U.P., 1990 (by Eliot’s husband after her long companionship with George Henry Lewes, chiefly hagiographical, a purification of Eliot’s life). DAVIS, Philip. The Transferred Life of George Eliot. Oxford: O.U.P., 2017 (Eliot’s life is approached through her letters, novels and the intellectual context). ** HAIGHT, uploads/Litterature/ 190910-bibliographie-middlemarch.pdf