Abstract
Research Article| August 01 2021 Recognizing Romola Audrey Jaffe Audrey Jaffe AUDREY JAFFE teaches at the University of Toronto and is the author of The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real: Conventions and Ideology (2016). She has published recently on affect and the Victorian novel and on Goffman and Middlemarch; and her essay on rent in Victorian fiction appears in From Political Economy to Economics through Nineteenth-Century Literature (2019), coedited with Elaine Hadley and Sarah Winter. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Novel (2021) 54 (2): 227–247. https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-9004495 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Audrey Jaffe; Recognizing Romola. Novel 1 August 2021; 54 (2): 227–247. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-9004495 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsNovel Search Advanced Search In a blog post about George Eliot's representation of fifteenth-century Florence in Romola (1862–63), Rohan Maitzen comments on parts of the novel that, she suggests, “induce giggles or worse” (“OLM”), including one she calls elsewhere a “truly terrible line of dialogue” (“Wherefore”). Her remarks resurrect, rephrase, and, for me, prompt a refocusing of a critique of this novel that has circulated since its publication: My favorite cringe-worthy moment in Romola arises from just this unfortunate combination of archaism and translation: “Good-day, Messer Domenico,” says Nello the barber to an arriving customer; “You come as opportunely as cheese on macaroni.” Awful, isn't it? But it's also the perfect illustration of the difference between an uninteresting failure—one that is just bad, lazy writing—and a failure that deserves our interest, maybe even our respect, because it's in service of something... Copyright © 2021 by Novel, Inc.2021 Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.
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