OTHERNESS AND THE QUEST FOR IDENTITY. AN EPITOME OF GEORGE ELIOT’S NOVELS
LUMEN – Copyright © 2007 – CULTURAL DIMENSIONS Book Series
FORMAT: Paperback PAGES: 96 LANGUAGE: English
ISBN: 978-973-1703-85-5
BUY ON: amazon.com, abebooks.com
Description:
In the paradigm of the Victorian canon, George Eliot s corpus presents itself as the “voice of a century” that draws the contours of protrusive individuals marked by the difference of otherness. Being both an epitome of the Victorian literature and a refined prolepsis of the psychoanalytical debate over the individual s self, Eliot s novels remain pillars of the cultural and epistemological society, in which identity involuntarily appears as a biased construct. Thus, a prolegomena of psychological and psychoanalytical framework of the conceptualization of “otherness” and “identity” is firstly performed, in order to set a theoretical starting ground for the further analysis. After such a presentation, the portraits of the distinct typologies of identity are drawn from George Eliot s novels, with a focus on the feminist other, racial different and the socio-political alien of the Victorian society. The aim of this study is to show that the derogatory stature of the other is not an issue concerning solely the contemporary literature, but rather, that it stems from the particularity of difference that was prevalent in the expanding society of the Victorian epoch. It also shows the individual at stake, trapped in the net of his own belligerent identity and the equalitarian society struggling to suffocate any attempt of acquired liberty. (The author)
Topics of interest:
- cultural, British, American, Jewish, Islamic studies
- George Eliot
- literary studies
