British Literature Survey
Thematic Focus: Authorial Intersections ("A.I.")

"Fred surprised his neighbours in various ways. He became rather distinguished in his side of the county as a theoretic and practical farmer, and produced a work on the 'Cultivation of Green Corps and the Economy of Cattle-Feeding' which won him high congratulations at agricultural meetings. In Middlemarch admiration was more reserved: most persons there were inclined to believe that the merit of Fred's authorship was due to his wife, since they ahd never expected Fred Vincy to write on turnips and mangel-wurzel.

But when Mary wrote a little book for her boys, called 'Stories of Great Men, taken from Plutarch,' and had it printed and published by Gripp & Co., Middlemarch, every one in the town was wiling to give the credit of this work to Fred, observing that he had been to the University, 'where the ancients were studied,' and might have been a clergyman if he had chosen.

In this way it was made clear that Middlemarch had never been deceived, and that there was no need to praise anybody for writing a book, since it was always done by somebody else (Middlemarch 779, my emphasis).

In this passage from George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-72), the narrator (and perhaps the author herself) indulges in a tongue-in-cheek reflection on the writing process and the problem of attribution. Who should really be praised for the creation of a work of art? Only the person who put pen to paper, or also the family and friends whose ideas and experiences informed the work of art? What of those authorial antecedents whose own artistic examples inspired or established a standard for the work of the author in question? Is artistic creation ever the product of a single individual?

These questions will inform our study of British literature, alongside the more traditional and chronological way of segmenting English 21 into Romantics, Victorians, and Modernists. As we tackle each new author, think not only of the ways s/he fits into a particular period, but of what ideas and perspectives s/he holds in common with those other writers who became before her/him.

It's a small world.

Paul Marchbanks
marchban@email.unc.edu