Abstract
The celebrated opening to L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, ‘the Past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’,2 implies a particular relationship between history and national identity. The past is identified as foreign Other in relation to the metaphorical and dominant nation of the historical present. This notion of the past as foreign Other identifies the ability to write history, to narrate the group experience, as ideologically crucial. For, whosoever writes the history speaks for the foreign country that is the past. Historiography is therein implicated in postcolonial theories of the nation as narrative, a collective story to be told. It is, on the one hand, part of what Edward Said calls ‘the method colonised people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history’.3 Reciprocally, history as narrative can be suppressed, or else loaded against the active acknowledgement and participation of subordinate groups.
G. Eliot, Adam Bede (1859), with an introduction by Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 49.
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Notes
G. Eliot, Adam Bede (1859), with an introduction by Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 49.
L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), p. 7.
William Baker, in ‘Memory: Eliot and Lewes “The Past is a Foreign Country: They Do Things Differently There”’, George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies, 24–5 (September 1993), pp. 118–31.
E. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), p. xiii.
B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), p. 6.
Though this term has become definitely associated with one particular critic, Hayden White, the term metahistory does have a more general resonance, as highlighted in Adrian Kuzminski’s ‘Defending Historical Realism’, History and Theory, 18:1 (1979), pp. 326–49.
A. Dwight Culler, The Victorian Mirror of History (London: Yale University Press, 1985), p. viii.
P. A. Dale, The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History: Carlyle, Arnold, Pater (London: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 2.
G. Lukács, The Historical Novel, translated from the German by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Pelican, 1981), p. 20.
T. Carlyle, ‘On History’, in A Carlyle Reader, ed. G. B. Tennyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 56.
A. Sanders, The Victorian Historical Novel 1840–1880 (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 1.
J. S. Mill, ‘Of the Inverse Deductive, or Historical Method’, in John Stuart Mill: On Politics and Society, ed. Geraint L. Williams (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1976), p. 75.
See J. S. Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism (London: Longmans, 1865).
J. Buckley, The Triumph of Time: A Study of the Victorian Concepts of Time, History, Progress, and Decadence (London: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 6.
R. Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought Vol 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 63.
See W. Baker (ed.), The George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Library: An Annotated Catalogue of Their Books at Dr. Williams’s Library, London (London: Garland, 1977), p. xx
G. Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Ark, 1985), p. 154.
S. Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (London: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. xii.
G. Eliot, Middlemarch (1872), with an introduction by W. J. Harvey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 25.
T. R. Wright, ‘George Eliot and Positivism’, Modern Language Review, 76 (1981), pp. 257–72.
T. R. Wright, ‘From Bumps to Morals: the Phrenological Background to George Eliot’s Moral Framework’, Review of English Studies, 33 (1982), pp. 35–46.
A. Comte, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte in Two Volumes, trans. Harriet Martineau (London: J. Chapman, 1853), I, p. 3.
B. Paris, Experiments in Life: George Eliot’s Quest for Values (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1965), p. 15.
J. F. Stephen, ‘Buckle’s History of Civilization in England’, Edinburgh Review, 107 (1858), p. 466.
J. P. Kenyon, The History Men: The Historical Profession in England Since the Renaissance (London: Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, 1983), p. 108.
J. W. Cross, George Eliot’s Life: As Related in her Letters and Journals (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1885), p. 232.
T. Arnold, ‘Essay on the Social Progress of States’ (1830), in The Miscellaneous Works of Thomas Arnold: Collected and Republished, ed. A. P. Stanley (London: B. Fellowes, 1845), p. 81.
H. Fraser, The Victorians and Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 38.
H. Witemeyer, in ‘George Eliot’s Romola and Bulwer-Lytton’s RienzV Studies in the Novel, 15 (1983), pp. 62–73)
H. E. Shaw, The Forms of Historical Fiction (London: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 30.
H. James, ‘The Life of George Eliot’, in Essays on Literature: American Writers, English Writers, ed. Library of America (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 1005.
L. Stephen, George Eliot (London: Macmillan, 1904), p. 137.
K. M. Newton, George Eliot: Romantic Humanist (London: Macmillan, 1981), p. 14.
G. Eliot, ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, in George Eliot: Selected Critical Writings, ed. Rosemary Ashton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 316.
J. Bayley, ‘The Pastoral of Intellect’, in Critical Essays on George Eliot, ed. Barbara Hardy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 200.
U. C. Knoepflmacher, George Eliot’s Early Novels — the Limits of Realism (Berkeley: California University Press, 1968), p. 22.
D. Morse, High Victorian Culture (London: Macmillan, 1993), p. 337.
B. Semmel, The Liberal Ideal and the Demons of Empire: Theories of Imperialism from Adam Smith to Lenin (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 4.
J. Dollimore and A. Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism (London: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 6.
P. Coveney, ‘Introduction’ to Felix Holt (1866) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 8.
U. C. Knoepflmacher, ‘Fusing Fact and Myth: the New Reality of Middlemarch’, in Essays on ‘Middlemarch’: This Particular Web, ed. Ian Adam (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1975), p. 68.
R. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 80.
C. Parker, The English Historical Tradition Since 1850 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990), p. 4.
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© 2000 Neil McCaw
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McCaw, N. (2000). Introduction: ‘Those Far-Reaching Visions of the Past’. In: George Eliot and Victorian Historiography. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286948_1
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