Middlemarch in 2019: A Read-a-thon

If you want to give reading (or re-reading) one of the greatest novels ever a go (yes I am a little biased, but it is true), take a look at the blog Middlemarch in 2019. There’s a great community of readers and writers over there, reading Eliot’s novel in the eight monthly parts Middlemarch was originally published in, from April until her bicentenary month, November 2019. Project team members regularly hop over to the other site to write about our love for this great novel. It’s never too late to join in.

Project Partner: The George Eliot Fellowship

George Eliot Fellowship Tour, 2016 at Chilvers Coton Church

The George Eliot Fellowship, a charity based in Eliot’s home town of Nuneaton, is run by tireless volunteers who work to promote Eliot’s work and preserve her legacy. You can find out about all the activities the GEF are undertaking for Eliot’s bicentenary on the charity’s website and Eliot bicentenary planner here. The project team will be working with the GEF to commemorate Eliot’s writing of provincial life through workshops for teachers and a designed a co-produced learning pack on Eliot for Key Stage 3 in the autumn of 2019.

Ruth Livesey, Principal Investigator

Ruth is Principal Investigator of the AHRC Leadership Fellowship, ‘Provincialism: Literature and the Cultural Politics of Middleness in Nineteenth-Century Britain’. She is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Thought in the Department of English, Royal Holloway, University of London. Her work adapting and co-writing the Great Middlemarch Mystery with Josephine Burton forms part of the larger AHRC funded engagement project ‘Finding Middlemarch in Coventry 2021′.

Welcome

This is the home page for the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded projects ‘Provincialism: Literature and the Cultural Politics of Middleness in Nineteenth-Century Britain‘ and ‘Finding Middlemarch in Coventry, 2021 – 2022‘.

Finding Middlemarch in Coventry, 2021 – 2022

#FindingMiddlemarch

In 2021-2022 we continue Eliot’s legacy as we celebrate the 150th anniversary of her novel ‘Middlemarch’, with public events in the year in which Coventry itself is UK City of Culture. Through our current project we will reimagine Eliot’s radical artistic vision of ‘provincial life’ in the Midlands through creative participation workshops and projects in Coventry including a collaborative online exhibition with Nuneaton Art Gallery and Museum and Coventry Archives, an immersive multi-location theatre experience with Dash Arts, and an experimental short film by Redell Olsen. Head over to our Events page to find out how you can get involved.

Provincialism: Literature and the Cultural Politics of Middleness in Nineteenth-Century

During 2019-2020 the project team explored how nineteenth-century writers defined English provincialism. We walked and mapped the countryside around Nuneaton, in North Warwickshire: a place made famous in the novels of provincial life by George Eliot. We brought new readers and writers to the legacy of George Eliot in her bicentenary year through talks, workshops, courses, and teaching packs. Our associated seminar series ‘Provincialism at Large’ featured literary scholars, political theorists, and art historians, working with graduate students to explore what provincialism and the depiction of provincial life meant to the Victorians in an age of imperialism.