George Eliot & the Novel of Vocation / Alan Mintz.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mintz, Alan, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Eliot, George, 1819-1880 Middlemarch.

LITERARY CRITICISM / General.

LITERARY CRITICISM / Women Authors.

Vocation in literature.

Local Subjects:

Eliot, George, 1819-1880 Middlemarch.

LITERARY CRITICISM / General.

LITERARY CRITICISM / Women Authors.

Vocation in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (204 p.)

Edition:

Reprint 2014

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2014]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Mintz has discovered a new sub-genre of fiction: the novel of vocation. In the nineteenth century, he maintains, work ceased to be merely what one did for a living or out of a sense of duty and became a vehicle for self-definition and self-realization. The change was prepared for by the growth of professions and the increase in middle-class career opportunities, He shows how George Eliot, in particular, linked these new social possibilities to the older Puritan doctrine of calling or vocation, achieving in her late novels a fictional structure that could encompass the conflicting energies of the age. In the idea of vocation she found a way to explore how far it is possible to be ambitious both for oneself and for a large cause, and a way to probe the contradictions between ambitious, self-defining work and the older institutions; of family, community, and religion. The book is solidly grounded in cultural and historical reality. Although Mintz concentrate on George Eliot and especially Middlemarch, he also examines the conceptions of self and work in Victorian biographies and autobiographies and the emergence in late-nineteenth-century fiction of the idea of the vocation of art.

Contents:

Frontmatter

PREFACE

CONTENTS

1. IDEAS AND INSTITUTIONS

2. THE SHAPE OF A LIFE IN BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

3. MIDDLEMARCH: THE ROMANCE OF VOCATION

4. MIDDLEMARCH: ORIGINS AND TAXONOMY

5. MIDDLEMARCH: INDIRECTION AND IDENTIFICATION

6. MIDDLEMARCH: CHOICE AND EVASION

7. DANIEL DERONDA AND THE MESSIANIC CALLING

8. EPILOGUE: THE CRAFT OF SOCIETY AND THE VOCATION OF ART

NOTES

INDEX

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Mai 2019)

ISBN:

0-674-42856-0

OCLC:

1023975643