Special Anniversary Issue of George Eliot—George Henry Lewes Studies 75, no. 1 (Fall 2023)
This ... more Special Anniversary Issue of George Eliot—George Henry Lewes Studies 75, no. 1 (Fall 2023)
This article argues that the representations of hearing play an essential role in mediating emotion, sympathy, and (anti)communitarian process in Eliot’s fictional works. I look at moments when the interface between sound and body communicates socialization or marginalization: in The Lifted Veil (1859), sound highlights the vulnerability and passivity of the individuals as opposed to the external world; in Romola (1862–63), while Baldassarre’s resistance to sound reveals his isolation, Romola’s vibration to sound communicates a more complex relationship between individual and community—though sound symbolizes historical changes that transform her into an outlier, it also connects her with her community by evoking the past. Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), indicates the limitations of hearing and exposes the boundary of sympathetic vibration—by using hearing to foreshadow, legitimize, and manipulate the characters’ destinies, Eliot touches the mythical origin of emotion and puts it at the center of (anti)communitarian process.
Literature and Medicine 38, no.1 (Spring 2020) ... more Literature and Medicine 38, no.1 (Spring 2020)
What light can De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) shed on its author's later advocacy of the First Opium War? To what degree did De Quincey's and other contemporaneous accounts of opium use in Britain influence metaphorical connections between bodily energy and national power in the 1830s and 1840s? Placing Confessions alongside John Brown's 1780 treatise, Elements of Medicine, this essay argues that De Quincey "nationalized" opium-eating by transforming mental exceptionality in British Romanticism into a medical body's connection with internal energies and external stimuli from China and "the Orient." The essay concludes that opium serves in De Quincey's Confessions as a crucial bridge between Romantic sublimity, in which it purportedly acted as a mysterious technology for self-strengthening, and Victorian consumerism, when the drug became a popular commodity among national and global users.
Special Anniversary Issue of George Eliot—George Henry Lewes Studies 75, no. 1 (Fall 2023)
This ... more Special Anniversary Issue of George Eliot—George Henry Lewes Studies 75, no. 1 (Fall 2023)
This article argues that the representations of hearing play an essential role in mediating emotion, sympathy, and (anti)communitarian process in Eliot’s fictional works. I look at moments when the interface between sound and body communicates socialization or marginalization: in The Lifted Veil (1859), sound highlights the vulnerability and passivity of the individuals as opposed to the external world; in Romola (1862–63), while Baldassarre’s resistance to sound reveals his isolation, Romola’s vibration to sound communicates a more complex relationship between individual and community—though sound symbolizes historical changes that transform her into an outlier, it also connects her with her community by evoking the past. Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), indicates the limitations of hearing and exposes the boundary of sympathetic vibration—by using hearing to foreshadow, legitimize, and manipulate the characters’ destinies, Eliot touches the mythical origin of emotion and puts it at the center of (anti)communitarian process.
Literature and Medicine 38, no.1 (Spring 2020) ... more Literature and Medicine 38, no.1 (Spring 2020)
What light can De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) shed on its author's later advocacy of the First Opium War? To what degree did De Quincey's and other contemporaneous accounts of opium use in Britain influence metaphorical connections between bodily energy and national power in the 1830s and 1840s? Placing Confessions alongside John Brown's 1780 treatise, Elements of Medicine, this essay argues that De Quincey "nationalized" opium-eating by transforming mental exceptionality in British Romanticism into a medical body's connection with internal energies and external stimuli from China and "the Orient." The essay concludes that opium serves in De Quincey's Confessions as a crucial bridge between Romantic sublimity, in which it purportedly acted as a mysterious technology for self-strengthening, and Victorian consumerism, when the drug became a popular commodity among national and global users.
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This article argues that the representations of hearing play an essential role in mediating emotion, sympathy, and (anti)communitarian process in Eliot’s fictional works. I look at moments when the interface between sound and body communicates socialization or marginalization: in The Lifted Veil (1859), sound highlights the vulnerability and passivity of the individuals as opposed to the external world; in Romola (1862–63), while Baldassarre’s resistance to sound reveals his isolation, Romola’s vibration to sound communicates a more complex relationship between individual and community—though sound symbolizes historical changes that transform her into an outlier, it also connects her with her community by evoking the past. Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), indicates the limitations of hearing and exposes the boundary of sympathetic vibration—by using hearing to foreshadow, legitimize, and manipulate the characters’ destinies, Eliot touches the mythical origin of emotion and puts it at the center of (anti)communitarian process.
What light can De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) shed on its author's later advocacy of the First Opium War? To what degree did De Quincey's and other contemporaneous accounts of opium use in Britain influence metaphorical connections between bodily energy and national power in the 1830s and 1840s? Placing Confessions alongside John Brown's 1780 treatise, Elements of Medicine, this essay argues that De Quincey "nationalized" opium-eating by transforming mental exceptionality in British Romanticism into a medical body's connection with internal energies and external stimuli from China and "the Orient." The essay concludes that opium serves in De Quincey's Confessions as a crucial bridge between Romantic sublimity, in which it purportedly acted as a mysterious technology for self-strengthening, and Victorian consumerism, when the drug became a popular commodity among national and global users.
This article argues that the representations of hearing play an essential role in mediating emotion, sympathy, and (anti)communitarian process in Eliot’s fictional works. I look at moments when the interface between sound and body communicates socialization or marginalization: in The Lifted Veil (1859), sound highlights the vulnerability and passivity of the individuals as opposed to the external world; in Romola (1862–63), while Baldassarre’s resistance to sound reveals his isolation, Romola’s vibration to sound communicates a more complex relationship between individual and community—though sound symbolizes historical changes that transform her into an outlier, it also connects her with her community by evoking the past. Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), indicates the limitations of hearing and exposes the boundary of sympathetic vibration—by using hearing to foreshadow, legitimize, and manipulate the characters’ destinies, Eliot touches the mythical origin of emotion and puts it at the center of (anti)communitarian process.
What light can De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) shed on its author's later advocacy of the First Opium War? To what degree did De Quincey's and other contemporaneous accounts of opium use in Britain influence metaphorical connections between bodily energy and national power in the 1830s and 1840s? Placing Confessions alongside John Brown's 1780 treatise, Elements of Medicine, this essay argues that De Quincey "nationalized" opium-eating by transforming mental exceptionality in British Romanticism into a medical body's connection with internal energies and external stimuli from China and "the Orient." The essay concludes that opium serves in De Quincey's Confessions as a crucial bridge between Romantic sublimity, in which it purportedly acted as a mysterious technology for self-strengthening, and Victorian consumerism, when the drug became a popular commodity among national and global users.