Middlemarch in the Twenty-First Century

Still taken as one of the greatest works of fiction, George Eliot's Middlemarch remains a living example of its own dictum that interpretations are illimitable. In this collection of new essays, the novel is reimagined and re-examined by a series of prominent critics, each offering a fresh reading of the work. The Middlemarch of this collection is an open text, a work as responsive to gaps and fissures as it is resistant to authority and other fixed notions of identity, ethics, and gender. The novel as an interrupted work scored by surprising omissions, as a material object that had to be carried as well as read, as a commercial artifact with surprising links to the market in chocolates, perfumes, and curative drugs, as a source for film and television adaptation - such concerns heighten the stakes of reading. These multiple perspectives enlarge, but also change, the way we inherit this monument of the literary canon.

Karen Chase is Professor of English at the University of Virginia.