Note 3 to Chapter 15 of the author's George Eliot and the Visual Arts, which Yale University Press published in a 1979. It has been included in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
"Ruskin and George Eliot's 'Realism,"' p. 206. See also Adam Bede (17:265); Essays, p. 89; and Richard Stang, "The Literary Criticism of George Eliot," Publications of the Modern Language Association, 72 (1957), 956. Other critics who recognize the active role of the artist's imaginative mind in George Eliot's theory of realism are Ian Gregor and Brian Nichols, The Moral and the Story (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), p. 31; Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Function (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 210; U. C. Knoepflmacher, George Eliot's Early Novels: The Limits of Realism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 24-37; Bernard Richards, "The Use of the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth-Century Novel," pp. 222-28; Elizabeth Ermarth, "Method and Moral in George Eliot's Narrative," Victorian Newsletter, 47 (Spring 1975), 4; J. Hillis Miller, "Optical and Semiotic in Middlemarch," in The Worlds of Victorian Fiction, ed. Jerome H. Buckley (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 138, 143; E. S. Shaffer, "Kubla Khan" and the Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770-1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 248-49; and Robert Langbaum, "The Art of Victorian Literature," in The Mind and Art of Victorian England, ed. Josef L. Altholz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), pp. 27-28.
For the contrary view that the mind is essentially a passive recorder of externals in George Eliot's theory of realism, see Kenneth Graham, English Criticism of the Novel, 1865-1900 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 21, and Peter Jones, Philosophy and the Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 67. On the expressive elements in Ruskin's aesthetic theory, see George P. Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 69-74, and Robert Hewison, John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), pp. 65-71.
Last modified 20 September 2000