George Eliot 3. Reception History
Reviews of Eliot's work by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and F.R Leavis are included in this lecture, which traces the reception history of Eliot's texts in the Victorian period and beyond. Catherine Brown examines the development of the 'modernist smirk' which looked down at Victorian literature, and follows Eliot's work into the present moment, where she demonstrates the application of Eliot's novels in Deconstructionist and Marxist approaches; the link between Eliot's texts and Feminist theory; and the relation of Eliot's work to science.