George Eliot 3. Reception History

In this third and final podcast, Dr Catherine Brown discusses the popularity of George Eliot's work in the Victorian period, which led to her status as a sage and the steady accumulation of her wealth. Reviews of Eliot's work by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and F.R Leavis are included in this lecture, which traces the reception history of Eliot's texts in the Victorian period and beyond. Catherine Brown examines the development of the 'modernist smirk' which looked down at Victorian literature, and follows Eliot's work into the present moment, where she demonstrates the application of Eliot's novels in Deconstructionist and Marxist approaches; the link between Eliot's texts and Feminist theory; and the relation of Eliot's work to science.