Identifying the Remains : George Eliot's Death in the London Religious Press

Collins, K.K.

ISBN 10: 0920604943 / ISBN 13: 9780920604946

Published by ELS Editions, 2007

About this Item

Former library copy. Pages intact with minimal writing/highlighting. The binding may be loose and creased. Dust jackets/supplements are not included. Includes library markings. Stock photo provided. Product includes identifying sticker. Better World Books: Buy Books. Do Good.

Seller Inventory # 57911644-6

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Identifying the Remains : George Eliot's Death in the London Religious Press
• Publisher: ELS Editions
• Publication Date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0920604943
• ISBN 13: 9780920604946
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Good
• Weight: 0.48 pounds

About this title

Synopsis

Conventional wisdom holds that the great Victorian novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880) lost her religious faith in her twenties, remained an agnostic (if not an atheist) for the rest of her life, and embodied in her fiction a secular humanism roughly equivalzent to Christian ethics cleansed of Christian belief. In Identifying the Remains, K. K. Collins challenges this commonly accepted view by exploring what the London religious press said about George Eliot when she died. With the entire secular coverage as background, Collins surveys over seventy-five obituaries, commemorative essays, critical articles, letters and notes from forty-eight religious papers and journals — Anglican, Baptist, Catholic, Jewish, Nonconformist, non-sectarian, Presbyterian, Primitive Methodist, Swedenborgian, Unitarian, and Wesleyan. He argues that the absence of a known “personality” for George Eliot, who carefully guarded her private life from public scrutiny, forced even hostile religious journalists to try to come to terms with the essential mystery of her beliefs, a process suggesting that her heterodoxy was not nearly so definable in her own time as we have come to suppose it is in ours.

About the Author

A graduate of the College of William and Mary in Virginia (A.B.) and Vanderbilt University (Ph.D.), K. K. Collins specializes in nineteenth-century English literature at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where he is Associate Professor of English and Distinguished Teacher. He is co-author of The Cumulated Dickens Checklist and has essays on Victorian literature in Nineteenth-Century Fiction , Victorian Studies , Modern Philology , Modern Language Review , and other journals. He has received grants from the American Philosophical Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as awards for two NEH Summer Seminars, an NEH Summer Institute at the Yale Center for British Art, a Mellon Seminar, and The School of Criticism and Theory. He is now preparing the volume on George Eliot for Palgrave s Interviews and Recollections series.