Abstract
George Eliot’s seriousness is often treated as a genre in itself by twenty-first-century critics. This chapter aims to reset the aesthetic dial by reading her novels Middlemarch, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss and Daniel Deronda through her forgotten Westminster Review essay on laughter, ‘German Wit: Heinrich Heine’ (1856). This was one of a number of essays Eliot wrote on Heine, a notorious iconoclast whose work also provided the literary mainstay of Sigmund Freud’s allusions in The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1905). Considering Eliot’s advanced interests in the short-form of the joke alongside her theorisation of the more ‘prolix’ humour (‘the incongruous aspects of everyday life’) renders new ways to interpret both sympathy and the ‘real’ in her work.
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Lee, L. (2020). George Eliot’s Jokes. In: Lee, L. (eds) Victorian Comedy and Laughter. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57882-2_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57882-2_6
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