From Author to Text

<p>First published in 1998 this volume proposes to shift the critical emphasis from a canonical author to her uncanonical text – from George Eliot to her novel <i>Romola</i> – and contends that this choice both broadens the range of interpretive possibilities and brings them into sharper focus.</p><p>The editors invited a variety of critics to put their different critical models to work on <i>Romola</i> and the results are fertile and suggestive: among the issues explored here are the domestic politics of marriage the relationship between narrative and epistemology the materiality of the text the novel’s relation to nineteenth-century narratives of martyrdom and the gendering of space. Such theoretical eclecticism when focused on a common reference point necessarily opens out into a dialogue among critical and interpretive models. Theory throws light onto <i>Romola</i> just as <i>Romola</i> throws light onto theory.</p>