George Eliot: Interdisciplinary Essays ed. by Jean Arnold and Lila Marz Harper (review)

The straightforward title of George Eliot: Interdisciplinary Essays suggests two implicit questions: why should we read George Eliot today? And how should we read George Eliot today? Readers of Victorian Studies may balk at the question of whether or not we should read Eliot now. Of course we should read Eliot. However, Eliot's place in the canon of Victorian studies was not always assured, and we would do well to remind ourselves that Eliot's popularity in English departments has a history. Included in the introduction to this volume is a short history of Eliot's reception alongside a "Mid-Twentieth-Century Memoir" entitled "George Eliot, Then and Now" by Thomas Pinney (4). This brief history of Eliot's reception notes that, with the advent of aestheticism, late-Victorian readers "bypassed Eliot's earlier realism," and the World Wars then led to criticism of the "conventional Victorian morality" that readers found in Eliot (4). Pinney's memoir, written especially for this collection, describes his experience with an Eliot who was "quite out of fashion" until her revival in the mid-twentieth century: "George Eliot? Who? She was not even an also-ran" (5). Indeed, it took the work of countless scholars to secure Eliot's place in Victorian studies.

The collection's answer to the second implied question is, of course, that we should read Eliot with an eye toward interdisciplinarity. The book accordingly is divided into five interdisciplinary sections, on periodical studies and the history of the book, Eliot's research methodology, Eliot and Victorian science, animals and environmental studies, and gender studies and feminism. Each section does two things. At least one essay reasserts Eliot's importance to the study of the Victorian period while at least one other essay connects Eliot to a problem or issue that twenty-first-century readers are struggling with right now in the humanities. As a bicentennial collection that celebrates Eliot's two-hundredth birthday, George Eliot: Interdisciplinary Essays aims to reestablish the centrality of Eliot to Victorian studies while simultaneously gesturing toward her value for a wide range of disciplines in the humanities.

The essays on periodical studies and the history of the book offer new perspectives on Eliot in the context of print culture and make connections to contemporary media studies. Wendy S. Williams argues that Eliot cultivated her public image as a great artist especially through her poetry, which she included in her novels as epigraphs or "mottoes" alongside epigraphs of other great poets (46). Alexis Easley connects Eliot's engagement with the New Journalism in Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings in Prose and Verse Selected from the Works of George Eliot (1872) and our current social media context in which "writers use tweets, postings, and recirculated content to establish their own celebrity identities—and where readers consume literature both as tit-bits and as full-length texts" (36). Together, these essays help us to think about Eliot as a kind of social media personality in addition to, or perhaps as an alternative to, a great author of the British canon.

While many of us are familiar with Eliot's quarry for Middlemarch (1871–72), we may be less familiar with her methods of conducting research and organizing information for other novels. As Andrew Thompson demonstrates, Eliot wrote Romola (1862–63) in the context of the professionalization of the discipline of history, which put Eliot under enormous pressure to "get things right" (65). In detailing Eliot's meticulous research on fifteenth-century Rome, Thompson argues that the novel must be read in terms of nineteenth-century historicism and the historical novel. Romola is not only a novel; it is also a work of scholarship. Similarly, Eliot's use of Christian and Hebrew mythology is well known, but, as Molly Youngkin shows, Eliot's engagement with Egyptian mythology has been overlooked. Egyptian mythology appears in all of Eliot's major novels...