“Middlemarch, Emulation, Embodiment, Empathy”
Theater was the most universal form of cultural experience in Britain and its colonies in the years between 1860 and 1914. A predominant theater led to an understanding of normal everyday life as theatrical. Literary works making no reference to the theater—or indeed evincing an anti-theatrical prejudice—could nevertheless not escape the genre’s influence as a sociological category and phenomenon. My talk examines how George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2), often considered an anti-theatrical novel, nevertheless understands theater’s hold on social life. Eliot shows social emulation, a theater-based sociological phenomenon, as inescapable. For contemporary scholars, Middlemarch all but centers the Victorian literary canon and its prestige genre, the novel. Its attitude towards the theater, however, shows that Middlemarch itself holds no such belief in the novel’s contemporary influence.
Date: Thursday, 27 February 2014, at 16.45 in G-160.