ABSTRACT
Ermarth, Elizabeth, "Maggie Tulliver's Long Suicide," Studies in English Literature 14:4 (Autumn 1974)
Haight, Gordon, George Eliot: A Biography, New York: Oxford University Press, and London: Clarendon Press, 1968
Homans, Margaret, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986
Henry James, in "The Art of Fiction," remarked that "the only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life." The question of how the novel seeks to represent "life" or "reality" in language is one of the most complex issues in literary theory. The question touches on the fields of philosophy (particularly the philosophy of language), linguistics, poetics, and narratology, insofar as a novel's narrative technique may be seen as an expression of its world view. Historically, different types of referentiality underlie different conceptions of mimesis, which in turn correspond, although not along strictly chronologicallines, to phases in the development of the novel.
