George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture [Hardcover]

George Eliot was passionate about music and her writing is steeped in musical allusion. This book explores musical reference in her work and investigates contexts such as Eliot's friendship with Wagner, the legacy of Romanticism, music's role in scientific theory, and the ambivalent status of female musicality. The book establishes how intensely Eliot's musical allusions are informed by her contemporary culture and offers a fresh view of the experimental writing through which she took literary realism into previously uncharted regions.Acknowledgements Introduction: Concords and Discords, Cadences and Cries Music, Science, Literature: The Large Music of Reasonable Speech Music and the Woman Question: The Minister of Domestic Concord and the Most Sensuous of Accomplishments The Mill on the Floss : A Mind Susceptible to Music Daniel Deronda : The Other Side of Silence Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

'...beautifully written.' - The Times Literary Supplement

'In George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture, da Sousa Correa takes our understanding of Victorian music and literature to new areas of complexity and depth, areas that, it is humbling to recognize, were just one part of Eliot's extraordinary cultural repertoire.' - Women: A Cultural Review

DELIA DA SOUSA CORREA is Lecturer in Literature at The Open University. She has published essays on George Eliot and John Ruskin and is editor of The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Realisms.