Marcus Clarke, the Two George Eliots, and the History of Two Newspapers

This essay is an experiment in a reader-focused historicism. It reconsiders the cultural-political circumstances under which Marcus Clarke rewrote George Eliot's â The Lifted Veilâ , reframing it as a radical late departure from Eliotâ s mid-Victorian realism, and from the Englishness of that realism. In doing so, the essay takes seriously the critical commonplace that texts â exist only in their readingsâ (Frow 244), their ongoing uses. By recovering something from a later moment (and a sharp lateral movement) in the history of â The Lifted Veilâ , I aim to show how that side-history, too, can illuminate the story, as well as our understanding of Eliotâ s career and the wider history of the mid-Victorian novel

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Cognitive reframing · George (robot · Historicism · Literature · Media studies · Modernism (music · Newspaper · Political science · Politics · Realism · Sociology · History · Law · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Philosophy