AustLit

'This essay is an experiment in a reader-focused historicism. It reconsiders the cultural-political circumstances under which Marcus Clarke rewrote George Eliot's ‘The Lifted Veil’, reframing it as a radical late departure from Eliot’s mid-Victorian realism, and from the Englishness of that realism. In doing so, the essay takes seriously the critical commonplace that texts ‘exist only in their readings’ (Frow 244), their ongoing uses. By recovering something from a later moment (and a sharp lateral movement) in the history of ‘The Lifted Veil’, I aim to show how that side-history, too, can illuminate the story, as well as our understanding of Eliot’s career and the wider history of the mid-Victorian novel.'

Source: Abstract.