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George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-72) is one of the classic novels
of English literature and was admired by Virginia Woolf as "one of
the few English novels written for grown-up people." The complex
main plot and many subplots revolve around Dorothea Brooke, an
ardent young woman, and her relationship to three men: Casaubon, a
clergyman and scholar twice her age; Lydgate, an ambitious young
doctor who shares Dorothea's enthusiasm for reform but whose flaws
compromise his ambitions; and Will Ladislaw, a young man of
mysterious origins, romantic temperament, and artistic
inclinations. A female Bildungsroman and a study of character and
society in the realistic mode pioneered by Balzac, Middlemarch is
also an historical novel that offers a panorama of English society
in an era of social reform and political agitation. This Broadview
edition includes a critical introduction and a rich selection of
contextual materials, including contemporary reviews of the novel,
other writings by George Eliot (essays, reviews, and criticism),
and historical documents pertaining to medical reform, religious
freedom, and the advent of the railroads.
Attack at daylight and whip them-that was the Confederate plan on
the morning of April 6, 1862. The unsuspecting Union Army of the
Tennessee, commanded by Major General Ulysses S. Grant, had
gathered on the banks of its namesake river at a spot called
Pittsburg Landing, ready to strike deep into the heart of Tennessee
Confederates, commanded by General Albert Sidney Johnston.
Johnston's troops were reeling from setbacks earlier in the year
and had decided to reverse their fortunes by taking the fight to
the Federals. Johnston planned to attack them at daylight and drive
them into the river. A brutal day of fighting ensued, unprecedented
in its horror-the devil's own day, one union officer admitted.
Confederates needed just one final push. Grant did not sit and wait
for that assault, though. He gathered reinforcements and planned a
counteroffensive. On the morning of April 7, he intended to attack
at daylight and whip them. The bloodshed that resulted from the
twoday battle exceeded anything America had ever known in its
history. Historian Greg Mertz grew up on the Shiloh battlefield,
hiking its trails and exploring its fields. Attack at Daylight and
Whip Them taps into five decades of intimate familiarity with a
battle that rewrote America's notions of war.
Gregory Maertz has written extensively on Romantic and Modern
literature, art, and ideas. In these nine related essays, he
investigates the expression of Romanticism in literature,
philosophy, and cultural politics from the Renaissance to
Modernism. The comparative essays in Part One examine the affinity
between the religious logic of Sir Thomas Browne and Søren
Kierkegaard; Tolstoys enduring attraction to Schopenhauers thought;
Rilkes debts to the sculptor Rodin; the identification of an early
novel by William Godwin as the chief precursor text to Mary
Shelleys Frankenstein; and the corresponding literary projects of
Osip Mandelstam, Rilke, and David Jones. In Part Two the essays are
clustered around the literary activity of writers and philosophers
associated with radicalism in Britain and transcendentalism in
America: a reconsideration of the life of William Godwin; the
central role played by English radicals in the transmission of
German literature; Godwins innovations in travel fiction; and the
crystallization of authorial identity around the influence of
Goethe in the work of women writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft,
Margaret Fuller, and George Eliot.
The construction of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as an Anglo-American
sage and literary icon was the product of a cult of personality
that lay at the centre of nineteenth-century cultural politics. A
reconstruction of the culture wars fought over Goethes authority, a
previously hidden chapter in the intellectual history of the period
ranging from the late eighteenth century to the threshold of
Modernism, is the focus of this book. Marginal as well as canonical
writers and critics figured prominently in this process, and this
book offers insight into the mediation activities of Mary
Wollstonecraft, Henry Crabb Robinson, the canonical Romantic poets,
Thomas Carlyle, Margaret Fuller, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, and
others. For women writers and Jacobins, Scots, and Americans,
translating Goethe served as an empowering cultural platform that
challenges the myth of the self-sufficiency of British literature.
Reviewing and translating German authors provided a means of
gaining literary enfranchisement and offered a paradigm of literary
development according to which 're-writers' become original writers
through an apprenticeship of translation and reviewing. In the
diverse and fascinating body of critical writing examined in this
book, textual exegesis plays an unexpectedly minor role; in its
place, a full-blown cult of personality emerges along with a
blueprint for the ideology of hero-worship that is more fully
mapped out in the cultural and political life of twentieth-century
Europe.
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