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COPYRIGHT 2001 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
By Hao Li. London: Macmillan, and New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. xiii + 227 pages.
It would be hard to imagine two topics more important to the novels of George Eliot than memory and history. Hao Li, wisely, does not attempt to cover the entire field of possibilities suggested by her title. Her major interest lies in the problems that what she terms "communal memory" pose for the characters in Eliot's novels and for Eliot herself, as thinker and author. By "communal memory," Li means something on the order of tradition, the medium that members of a society carry with them from the past, conditioning their very perception of the present: "`communal memory' ... means forms, both fictional and real, of collective mentality and moral consciousness, shared feelings, manners, rituals, customs as well as verbal expressions, which have evolved over generations" (1). Some of the more interesting pages in Li's book come right at its opening, when she distinguishes between communal memory and such concepts as "the collective unconscious."
The relevance and usefulness of some such concept to Eliot's fiction seem clear enough, once Li has raised the issue. Any reader of, say, The Mill on the Floss must be aware of the pull of the past on a character like Maggie Tulliver, for whom no escape seems possible from the claims of her local community and her familial past. Li is interested in just what it is that binds such characters as...
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