History Reincarnate: George Eliot and Qurratulain Hyder

Abstract: This essay sets aside George Eliot's preoccupation with incarnation, a principle extrapolated from the New Testament, and instead identifies in her work a parallel discourse of reincarnation: the reentry into flesh, the successive rebirth and reembodiment of a preexisting spiritual entity in new forms. Drawing on Victorian understandings of Buddhism and Hinduism, I trace Eliot's interest in forms of ensouled embodiment that take shape in multiple iterations over time. Inspired by calls to reimagine the geographical and chronological boundaries of Victorian studies, I additionally pair Middlemarch (1871–72) with Qurratulain Hyder's River of Fire (English trans. 1998), a twentieth-century Urdu novel which makes reincarnation a central narrative principle. In doing so, I examine how both authors employ a reincarnational aesthetic to theorize the place of the individual in history and even the nature of history itself.