An overview of American Multiculturalism in cultural studies

Topic:  An Overview of American Multiculturalism in Cultural studies....

Paper Name: Cultural Studies

Paper no: 8

Name: Bhatt Urvi

Roll no: 32

Submitted to: department of English maharaja krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar university  

·       The Beginning of the word Culture:

       ‘Culture’ comes from ‘cultura’ and ‘colore’. It’s meaning is ‘to cultivate’. By the 19^th century in Europe it’s meaning was different. It meant the habits, customs and tastes of the upper classes.

·       What is culture?

“Culture is the full range of a learned human behavior. Culture includes arts, beliefs, customs, inventions, language, technology and traditions.” 

“The arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively is culture.”

“ The quality in a person or society that arises from a concern for what is regarded as excellent in arts, letters, manners, scholarly pursuits etc means Culture.”

                         ‘Culture’ is the mode that generates meanings and  ideas. This ‘mode’ is a negotion over which meanings are valid meanings governed by power relations. Elite culture controls meanings because it control the term of the debate. Nonelite views on life and art are rejected as ‘tasteless’, ‘useless’ or even stupid by the elite. The meaning is that certain components of culture get more visibility and significance.

·       Cultural Studies:

                          Cultural studies designates a cross-disciplinary enterprise for analyzing the conditions that affects the production, reception and cultural significance of all type of institutions, practices, and products, among these, literature is accounted as merely, one of many forms  of cultural ‘signifying practices’.

                          A prominent endeavor in cultural studies is to subvert the distinctions in traditional criticism between “high literature” and “high art” and what were considered the lower forms that appeal to a much larger body of consumers cultural studies pay less attention to work in the established literary canon than to popular fiction best-selling romances, journalism, and advertising, together with other arts that have mass apeal such as, cartoon comics, Film, T.V. ‘soap operas’ and rock and rap music. Radical exponents of cultural studies subordinate literary studies and criticism to political activism, they orient their writings and teaching towards the explict end of reforming existing power structures and relations, which they consider to be dominated by a privileged gender, race or class. many cultural studies are devoted to the analysis and interpretation of objects and social practices outside the other arts. The tone of early vision of cultural studies was set by students of the British New Left, especially Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams. Cultural studies adapts methods of analysis from various disciples: Media studies, Cultural anthropology, discourse analysis, Popular culture studies and audience studies. Cultural studies says that one cannot ‘read’ culture artifacts only within the aesthetic realm.

·       The types of cultural studies:

                 There are five types of cultural studies:

A)   British culture Materialism

B)    New Historicism

C)    American Multiculturalism

D)   Post-modernism and popular culture

E)    Post colonial studies

A) British culture Materialism:

              It is also known as ‘ Cultural Materialism’ in Britain. In late 19^th century, Matthew Arnold redefined the ‘givens’ of British culture. Edward Burnett Taylor’s ‘primitive culture’ argues that :

“culture or civilization, taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is a complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities.”

                       Williams memorably states:

                                “There are no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses”

                                         In modern Britain two trajectories for “culture” developed one led back to past and the feudal hierarchies that ordered community in past here, culture acted in its sacred function as preserver utopia that would annual the distinction between labor and leisure classes and make transformation of status, not fixity, the norms.

                                        Cultural materialism began in earnest in the 1950s with the work of F.R.Leavis, heavily influenced by Matthew Arnold’s analysis of bourgeois culture. Leavis sought to use the educational system to distribute literary knowledge and appreciation more widely,Leavisites promots the “Great tradition” of Shakespeare and Milton to improve the moral sensibilities of a wider range of readers than just the elite.Ironically the threat to their project was mass culture.

B)  New Historicism:

                   Laputa-“ the whore”.what did Jonathan swift mean when he gave that name to the flying island in the third voyage of Gulliver’s Travels? It is a question that has tantalized readers since the 18^th century.The science fiction aspect f that island still amuses us,but why”the whore”?there may be an answer and as we will show later,new historicism is the right approach to answer  this question.

                  New historicism/old historicism: Says Porter,saw history as”world views magisterially unfolding as a series of tableaux in a film called progress” ,as though all Elizabethans,for example,held views in common.The new historicism rejects this periodization of history in favour of ordering history only through the interplay of forms of power.

C)  American multiculturalism:

                  It is about American culture ,America has many cultures:

·       African American writers

·       Latina/0 writers

·       American Indian Literatures

·       Asian American writers

D) Post- modernism  and Popular culture:

               Postmodernism celebrates the very act of dismembering tradition.It question radicalism.There are four main types of popular culture.They are:

1 -Production analysis

2-Textual analysis      

3-Audience analysis         Popular Culture

4-Historical analysis

                      Modernist literature rejected the Victorian aesthetic of prescriptive morality and using new techniques drawn from psychology, experimented with point of view, time space and stream of consciousness writing.

·       Post-colonial studies:

                             Post colonialism refers to a historical phase undergone by Third world countries after the decline of colonialism. Said’s concept of oriental was an important touchstone to post colonial studies, as he described the stereotypical discourse about the East as constructed by the West. Said sharply critiques the Western image of the oriental. Frantz Fanon, a French Caribbean Marxist, drew upon his own horrific experiences French Algeria to deconstruct emerging national regimes. Homi K. Bhabha’s post colonial theory involves with poststructuralist ideas of identity and indeterminacy, defining post colonial identities as shifting, hybrid construction.

                               Among the most important figures in post colonial feminism is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who examines the effects of political independence upon “Subaltern” or sub proletarian women in the Third World.

                               Now I explain American Multiculturalism in detail…………

                 

·       American Multiculturalism:

                                In 1965 the Watts race riots drew worldwide  attention. The civil Rights Act has passed in 1964. There were murders and other atrocities attended the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, President Johnson Signed voting rights act. The Black Panther party come to existence, All African American students in the South attended segregated schools and discrimination was still illegal in many states, ‘race’ problem was challenged.

                                   In the new century, if interracial trends continue, Americans will be puzzled by race distinctions from the past since children of multiracial backgrounds may be the norm rather than the exception. And given the huge influx of Mexican Americans into the United States over the last fifty years, immigration pattern indicate that by the year 2050 Anglo-Americans will no longer be the majority, nor English necessarily the most widely spoken language.

                                    “Every American should understand Mexico from the point of view of the observer of the conquest and of the history before the conquest… No American should graduate from college without a framework of knowledge that includes at least some construct of Asian history, of Latin-American history of African history.’’

1.   African American writers :-

                            In ‘Shadow and Act’[1964] novelist Ralph Evison argues that “any viable theory of Negro American culture obligates us to fashion a more adequate theory of American culture as a whole”.

                             American arts, fashion, music and so much besides is based upon African American culture from Oprah to Usher. African American writing displays a ‘double consciousness’, as W.E.B. Eilison requested Black writers to have faith in their own experiences and definitions of reality. It seems as if they did so. Toni Morison’s ‘Bluest Eye’, Gwendolin Brooks’s ‘We Real Cool’ and many others wrote about their culture and their efforts of long struggle.

                    “Black people had before they knew there was such a thing as art”

-         Ellison                                                                                                                              

                                              Hurston, Hughes, Countee Cullen were the center of literary life and black culture. African American writing continued to enter the main stream with the protest novels of the 1940s. The 1960s brought Black power and the Black Arts Movement. There was struggle between Black and White literature.

2.   Latina/o writers :-

                         They are Mexican American. This term indicates a broad sense of ethnicity among Spanish-Speaking and most influential group of Latina/o ethnicities in the United States.

                                              The history of the indigenous cultures of the new world is punctuated by Indian Nations, European countries, especially Spain, Portugal, France and England then by the United states. Mexican American literature was the combination of Spanish art and their culture. They create new Folk culture and literature. According to Juan Flores and George Yudice:

“The search for ‘America’ the inclusive multicultural society of the continent, has to do with nothing less than the imaginative those of remapping and renaming in the service not only of Lalinos but of all climates.”

3.   American Indian Literature:-

                             For American Indians, stories are a source of strength in the face of centuries of silencing by Euro-Americans. A term ‘Native American’ is preferred by most academics and many tribal, members, who find the term ‘Indian’ a misnomer and stereotype- as in “cowboys and Indians” or “Indian giver” that helped whites wrest the sentiment away from indigenous people. Their  identities are Tribal.

                                 Traditional literature was and is oral, because the Indian tribes did not have written languages, European newcomers assumed they had no literature. In fact American Indians were the creator of the first American literature, Traditional Indian literature is not especially accessible for the average reader, and it is not easy to translate from Cherokee into English. Their myth and stories are designed to perpetuate their heritage and instruct young, Cure illness ensure victor in battle or ‘Secure fertile’ fields. It is practical literature.

                                      The American authors are Samson Occam, William Apess, Yellow Bird   [ John Rollin Ridge], Simon Pokagon, Sra Winnemucca Hopkins,  McNickle and Mourning Dove. These writer dealt with native rights the duplicities of U.S. government and military leaders creation myths, trickster humor and tribute constancy.

4.   Asian American writers:-

                                                              Asian American literature is written by people of Asian descent in the United states. Asian immigrates were denied citizenship as late as the 1950s, Edward Said wrote ‘oriental’s’ Asian American writers include Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Polynesian and many other people of Asia, the pacific. These cultures present a bewildering array of languages, religions, social structures and skin color, and hence the category is even more broad and artificial than Latina/o or American Indian.

                                                             Asian American literature can be said to have begun around the turn of the twentieth century. Increasing attention in Asian American studies has been focused on writers from Hawaii, Guam and the Philippines including. Asian American writing is quiet among Americans as well as other countries.

                        America has multiculturalism Bernard Bell reviews some primary features of American writing and compares value systems :

“Traditional white American values emanate from a providential vision of history and of Euro-Americans as a chosen people a vision that sanctions their individual and collective freedom in the pursuit of profit, and happiness Radical freedom Protestantism, constitutional democracy and industrial capitalism are the white American trinity of values”                             

v  Conclusion:-

                              American Multiculturalism has worldwide attention. It is a mixture of all the cultures of the world. It deals with racial problems. It deals with modern literature too. America has people from all over the world. The folk and traditional American culture is interesting. The work of American writer discussed Modernity, Myth, Slavery and many other problems. Basically American literature was not written but it was an oral form as American and Indian literature. After the colonial settlement it started to be written.

                     

     

Discuss Structure, sign and Play elaborating Derrida's view

Topic:- Discuss Structure, Sign and Play elaborating Derrida’s                                     view

Paper Name: Literary Theory and criticism

Paper no.: 7

Name: Bhatt Urvi

Roll no.: 32

Submitted to: Department of English Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Introduction:-

                             Jacques Derrida was Algerian born French Philosopher. In the area of philosophy and literary criticism alone, Derrida has been cited more than 14000 times in Journal articles over the past two decades. Derrida’s deconstructionist works are integrally related to post-modernism. He taught philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1960 to 1964. One values Derrida’s writings and the philosophical position and intellectual positions from which he proceeds, it would be wrong handed to think of him as an occupant of some ‘Ivory Tower’.

v Structure, Sign and Play Elaborating Derrida’s view:-

                  “Structure, Sign and Play” shows how philosophy and science understand ‘Structure’. Derrida discusses with structuralism, a type of analysis which understand individual elements of language and culture as embedded in larger structures. The archetypal example of structuralism is discussed by Ferdinand de Saussure.

                        Derrida also directly dealt with Saussure in a related book title Grammatology. In Grammatology the relationship between elements of cultural systems like mythology is analyzed.

                             The New York Times pointed out in its obituary for Derrida that “Structure, Sign and Play” offered professors of literature a philosophical movement they could legitimately consider their own.

           

“Structure, Sign and Play” was first published in 1970. Derrida admirers the reflexivity and abstract analysis of structuralism, but argues that these discourses have still not gone far enough in treating structures as free floating or ‘playing’ sets of relationships. He accuses structuralism discourses of holding on a ‘center’: a privileged term anchoring the structure and does not play. Derrida suggests that this model of structure will end-is ending and that a never and freer thinking about structures will emerge.

                       The essay begins by speculating, “perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an ‘event’, if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural-structuralist – thought to reduce or suspect.” The ‘center’ is that element of a structure which appears given or fixed, thereby anchoring the rest of the structure and allowing it to play.

                                 In the history of metaphysics, this function is fulfilled by different term like

        “eidos, arche, telos, energia, ousia [essence, existence, substance subject] aleteia,         transcendentality, consciousness or conscience, God, man, and so forth.”

                                      Whichever term is at the center of the structure, argues Derrida, the overall pattern remains similar. This central term ironically escapes structurality, the main character of structuralism by which all meaning is defined relationally, with the help of other structure.                                  

                              The question to be discussed is the opening of the structure which became inevitable ”when the structurality of structure had to begin to be thought” and the contradictory role of the center exposed. The result of the event, according to Derrida, must be the full version of structural “free play”, a mode in which all terms are truly subject promised by structuralism.

                                             According to Derrida, just as philosophers use metaphysical term used and concept to critique metaphysics, the ethnologist “accepts into his discourse the premises of ethnocentrism at the very moment when he is employed in denouncing them”.

                                           Derrida further discusses, Levi-Strauss use of the term ‘bricolage’. Brecolage becomes a metaphor for philosophical and literary critiques, exemplifying Derrida’s argument about the necessity of using the language available. The bricoleur’s foil is the engineer, who creates out of whole cloth without the need for bricolage.

Derrida says:-

                                     “Structural discourse on myths-mythological discourse on myths-mythological discourse-must itself is mythopomorphic.”

                                    Derrida also criticizes Levi-Strauss for his inability to explain historical changes-for describing historical changes-for describing structural transformation as the result of mysterious outside forces. Derrida concludes by reaffirming the existence of a transformation within structuralism, suggesting that it espouses this affirmative view of unlimited free and presenting it as unpredictable yet inevitable.

v Define Deconstruction:-

                         Deconstruction, as applied in the criticism of literature, designates a theory and practice of reading which questions and claims to “subvert” or “undermine” the assumption that the system of language provides groups that are adequate to establish the boundaries, the coherence or unity, and the determinate meanings of a literary text.

·       Deconstruction:

                  In the criticism of literature, Deconstruction is a theory and practice of reading which questions and claims to ‘subvert’ and ‘undermine’. The attention was shifted from the writer to the work of literary text, consequently textual analysis become more important than extra textual information. In this process the important of the reader and his understanding increased, and the Reader Response or Reception Theory came into being. Derrida gives the same process a further and final push according to which what matters is the reading and not the writing of the text. The readers rules the supreme and the validity of his reading cannot be challenged. However the structure of each reading has to be coherent and convincing.

·       Decentering the centre:-

                             Derrida deconstructs the metaphysics of presence. He seeks to prove that the structurality of the structure does not indicate a presence above its free play of signs. This presence was earlier supposed to be the centre of the structure which was paradoxically thought to be within, and outside this structure, it was truth and within, it was intangibility. But Derrida contends that, ‘the centre could not be thought in the form of a begging presence’. The textuality is the free play of signifiers. There is no signifier that is not itself a signifier. Derrida seeks to undermine “a prevailing and generally unconscious ‘idealism’, which asserts that language does not create meanings but reveals them, thereby implying that meanings, pre-exists their expression.”

                                      This for Derrida is nonsense. For him there can be no meaning which is not formulated, we cannot reach outside language.

·       Supplementarity:-

                       A text is a work of language and language as such according to Derrida, is like time, ever in a state of flux. Just as time has no origin, so also the origin of language is inconceivable.

v Derrida quotes and approve Levi-Strauss who writes:

“Whatever may have been the moment and the circumstances of its appearance in the scale of animal life, language could only have been born in one full swoop.”

It is always gaining in new elements and loosing the older ones.

“The totality of the myths of a people”

Derrida quotes Levi-Strauss:-

“is of the order of the discourse. Provided that these people do not become physically or morally extinct, this totally is never extinct.”

                 The language paradoxically comes into being as a quest of imaginary truth apart from language and continues to realize the lack of truth in the words that it employs. The absence of centre of a origin is the movement of Supplementarity. The process of Supplementarity has no end. Because positive and concrete definition is impossible for any term, every term necessarily requires a supplement or supplements, something or some things which helps it exist and understood.                     The truth of the text which in fact only language, and create in our quest another text through our criticism to supplement the lack of the original text. Original text-reading is reactivating the expressivity of the text with help of its indicative signs. But in the words of John Sturrock,

“The meanings that are read into it may or may not coincide with the meanings which the author believes he or she has invested it with.”

                          Derrida demonstrated how the history of thought contradicted itself and in so doing imploded the foundation of western philosophy. There is scant little chance of denying that Derrida himself holds some special place in this development: if not as its father than at least as its catalyst.

                             Derrida emphasizes that to deconstruct is not to discovery, that his task is to “dismantle the metaphysical and rhetorical structures” operative in a texts “not in order to reject or discard them, but to reconstitute them in another way”, that he puts into question the “search for the signified not annual it, but to understand it within a system to which such a reading is blind.”

v Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences:-

                   In his famous essay, ‘structure, sign and play in the Discourse of the Human science s’ which was read at the John Hapkins International colloquium on “The Language of Criticism and the sciences of Man” in         October 1966. Derrida demonstrates how structuralism as represented by the anthropologist  Claude Levi-Strauss which sets out as a criticism or  rejection of science and metaphysics can be read as embodying precisely those aspects of science and metaphysics which it seeks to challenge. The essay concludes by saying:

“There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of free play, the one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free from free play and from the order of the sign, and lives like an exile the necessity of interpretation.”

                      Thus, we have two diametrically opposite interpretations of structuralism, and we are unable to decide which the ‘right’ one is. Thus ‘aporia’ between two interpretations is due to the force of ‘difference’ intrinsic to the structure of language. Characteristically, Derrida in this essay notes that ‘language bears within itself, the necessity of its own critique’. The essay considered as inauguration of ‘post structuralism’ as a theoretical movement.

v Conclusion:

                                                            Derrida concludes by reaffirming the existence of a transformation within structuralism, suggesting that it espouses this affirmative view of unlimited free and presenting it as unpredictable yet inevitable.

  

                     

'Middlemarch' as a social Document

Topic: - “Middlemarch” as a Social Document

Paper name: The Victorian Age

Paper no. 6

Name: Bhatt Urvi

Roll no. 32

Submitted to: Department of English Maharaja                             Krishnakumarsinhji University

v Introduction:

                   Middlemarch is a study of provincial life and the scene is laid in the provincial town of Middlemarch in the first half of the nineteenth century. It is a love story  principally dealing with the affairs of Dorothea Book and Miss Rosamond Vincy ending in despaired.

 “In Middlemarch, the psychology tends more dearly towards an intuitive idea of mind and consciousness. Her most powerful novel, even if it is not inspired or the most harmoniously constructed, is the last in which the activity of her courageous, ever moving mind has been expressed in terms of scenes and figures familiar to herself, and thus endowed with artistic reality.”

v George Eliot[1819-80]:

                       Mary Ann Evans wrote under the pen-name of George Eliot. She had religious and spiritual speculation. Her novels deals with the tragedy of ordinary lives, unfolded with an intense sympathy and deep insight in to the truth of character. There is little striking incident       in her novels, but her plots are skillfully managed. Behind all her writing there lies a sense of the tragedy of life, in which sin or folly brings its own retribution.

v Setting of the novel:

                              Middlemarch is George Eliot’s sixth novel. The reaction of the novel is mixed one. Contemporary reviewers, in general admired. In Middlemarch the novelist returns once again to the English Midlands in which her girlhood had been passed and which had fertilized her imagination. The location of Middlemarch has been left indeterminate and vague, the setting has not been precisely delineated, as is the case with the other early novels like ‘Adam Bede’, ‘Mill on the Floss’ and ‘Silas Marner’. George Eliot is once again on familiar grounds and Midland scenes and sights have been realistically and feelingly sketched. Middlemarch acquires a symbolic significance, symbolic of English rural life in the 1830’s. Contemporary, political and social problems are harmonized with private and personal life.

v Plot of the novel:

                     The novel’s plot is complicated. It is made up of four different stories.

A] Dorothea-Casaubon-Ladislaw story:

                              Dorothea marries a man twice older to herself. He dies within a year of their marriage. Dorothea inherited Casaubon’s property of she does not marry Ladislaw, Casaubon’s protégée. But in the end of the novel Dorothea takes right decision and marries Will and thus decision Mr. Casaubon’s property. She understood that her first decision was just lofty aspiration.

B] Rosamond-Lydgate story:

                                       Both married each other in false impression. Rosamond wanted to live extravagant life like upper-class people where as Lydgate though was a doctor could not earn that much. Both left Middlemarch. Lydgate died later on Rosamond marries well to do physician and settle elsewhere.

C] Fred Vincy-Mary Garth story:

                                  Their childhood love grows to maturity. Fred becomes a good person marries Mary, inherits his uncle’s previous estate and lives peacefully with his children. He and Mary had to suffer a lot but things ended well.

D] Bulstrode’s episode:

                                        His way of livelihood, the relation of his shady past and its consequences. He was blackmailed for his past deeds.

                                          There is also the story of miser Featherstone who made two wills and thus created fuss. These different stands were interwoven into an organic whole. Middlemarch like other novels have faults. There is also much of superfluous as far as characters and incidents are concerned.

·      Themes in the novel:

                              There is the theme of the noble aspirations frustrated both by a repressive environment-meanness of opportunity-and “the spots of commonness” in the character concerned. Dorothea and Lydgate are the main characters who are frustrated in this way. There is also the theme of Theresa-Complex exemplified through the story of Dorothea who is said to be a self-projection, an externalization of the Theresa-Complex in the novelist herself. Another theme is the clash of the old and the new, a depiction of how the past shapes the future, and how the future is controlled and determined by the present.

·      Crowd of characters:

                                The canvas of Middlemarch is a crowded one. it is a long novel running into over eight hundred minutely printed pages in the Penguin Edition. There is a host character, so many that all of them cannot even be named in the space. The main characters may be divided into four groups. Te first one is Brooks-consisting of Mr. Edward Brook, his two nieces-Dorothea. The elder sister and Celia, the younger one. They reside at Tipton Grange near the town of Middlemarch. Secondly, there are the Vincys-the father and head of the family is Mr. Walter Vincy. The elderson is Fred Vincy, the daughter is Rosamond Vincy and Mrs. Lucy Vincy, wife of Walter Vincy. The third one is the Garth family including Caleb Garth, Mary Garth, Mrs. Garth, Alfred Garth and Christy Garth. The fourth family is of Mr. Edward Casaubon, a clergy and scholar, residing at Lowick Manor, and his cousin Ladislaw.  Other important characters are Peter Featherstone, a rich miser who is the owner of Stoncourt. Joshu Rigg, Nicholas Bulstrode, a rich banker his wife Harriet Bulstrode, sir James Chettan, an amiable Baronet who marries Celia, and Tertius Lydgate a doctor of advanced views, and an outsider in Middlemarch. Of the minor characters, the more important ones are Mr. and Mrs. Cadwallader Reverend. The list is a long one and it is by no means exhaustive or all-inclusive.

·      Title :

                      As the title suggest the novel gives us a realistic, vivid and comprehensive picture of provincial life of England. The picture is such that if there is any hero in the novel it is the society of Middlemarch. The action of the novel takes place in Middlemarch or the neighboring parishes of Tipton, Lowick or Freshet. As Quentin Anderson points out, “it is a landscape of opinion”, and not any natural landscape, which is dominant in the novel. 

·      Woman and the society of Middlemarch:

                            Celia is an interesting representative of the kind of woman who is entirely happy with the feminine, nursery world. Their uncle, as usual, unconsciously expresses the conventional view with perfect exactness when he says to Casaubon, Dorothea’s husband: “Get Dorothea to read few light things, Smollett: Roderick Random, Humphrey Clinker, they are a little brood, bit she may read anything now she’s married, you know.” This society was transitional. The poor tenants raised their voice against their landlords. They demands better conditions of living. Me. Hawley regards Me. Brooke to be a “damned bad landlord”. Their feelings changed, though the old older still continues.

·      Traditional Society:

                               

                     The limited, isolated community has certain well-marketed characteristics. Everything new or transformation is seen with suspension. Class distinctions are taken for granted and every class carries with it, its own privileges. The class to which Mrs. Cadwallader belongs shields her effectively. It never goes away from the mind of Mr. Brooks, or anybody else that his activities in favour of the Reform Bill could work in the direction of reducing his hereditary privileges as a landowner.

·      Conflict in Town:

                           Old and new both existed in Middlemarch. Old was dominant but new was the future. Religion was divided in to two. One is the practical, kindly, undogmatic tradition of which is Mr. Farebrother. The other is vehement and fanatical, is loosely called evangelical. Bulstrode and the older is suspicious of the new.

A.O.J. Cockshut:-  “ The relation between the Evangelicals and the old fashioned, decent traditional Anglicanism is well given in the exchange between Mr. Vincy and Bulstrode at the end of chapter 13.”

                         The novel has some weak points yet it can be called classic.

“The book is full of high feeling, wisdom and acuteness. It contains some of the most moving dramatic scene in our literature.” It gives us a complete, realistic view of English provincial society in 1830’s and this setting is closely integrates four or five which form the plot of the novel.

·      Conclusion:

                             In short, Middlemarch is such a great novel because of the solidity, vividness and truthfulness and comprehensiveness of the picture of provincial life presented in the novel. This makes it a valuable social document which tells us more about the real, day to day, common, provincial life of England in the 1830’s, than any book of history.