Transformation of Rage
Mourning and Creativity in George Eliot's Fiction
By
Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone
Published: 1994
Open Access Since: 2016
Subjects:
Literature & Literary Studies
Paperback ISBN: 9780814742358
Hardcover ISBN: 9780814741948
Consumer eBook ISBN: 9780814743201
Library eBook ISBN: 9780814743973
Number of pages: 224 pages
Buy the book: https://nyupress.org/9780814742358
George Eliot has been widely praised both for the richness of her prose and the universality of her themes. In this compelling study, Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone goes beyond these traditional foci to examine the role of aggression in Eliot's fiction and to find its source in the author's unconscious sense of loss stemming from traumatic family separations and deaths during her childhood and adolescence. Johnstone demonstrates that Eliot's creative work was a constructive response to her sense of loss and that the repeating patterns in her novels reflect the process of release from her state of mourning for lost loved ones.
Contributor Bios
Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone is an independent scholar in Saratoga Springs, New York. She has published essays on George Eliot in Hartford Studies, Literature and Psychology, and Mosaic.Reviews
"Johnstone's description of the tumultuous events in George Eliot's work is an excellent illustration of applied psychoanalysis." ~ George H. Pollock, M.D., Ph.D., Psychoanalytic Books
Open Access
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
(CC BY-NC-SA).