Episode 100: Middlemarch, Part 1

For our 100th episode (!!!), it’s only fitting we tackle a Big One. And George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-1872) is certainly that – literally (it’s SO MANY PAGES). Middlemarch tells the stories of several intersecting characters all trying in various ways to find meaning amid the alienation of industrial modernity, and we discuss epistemology, philosophy, gender, class and bourgeoisification, marriage, capital-H History, politics. This kind of is a novel about everything. Also, failsons abound! It wouldn’t be Better Read than Dead without failsons. Don’t forget to join us next week for Part Two!

We read the Oxford edition, edited by David Carroll with an introduction by Felicia Bonaparte. For more on Eliot’s interest in nineteenth-century science and its bearing on Middlemarch’s epistemological concerns, we highly recommend Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, which we discuss on the show. And for another good discussion of Middlemarch and its contexts, check out this 2018 In Our Time episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/middlemarch/id73330895?i=1000409248380.

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