• Human capital, encompassing education, skills, health, and productivity

  DOI:DOI:18.A003.aarf.J14I01.010286

SK Raghupathula

Abstract: Human capital, encompassing education, skills, health, and productivity, has gained center-stage in modern economies as a prime determinant of economic development. In contrast to traditional growth factors embodied by land and physical capital, human capital contributes to economic progress through knowledge creation, innovation, and the assimilation of technologies that promote an increase in efficiency in labour. Its importance becomes all the more vital as economies increasingly assume a knowledge-based structure. This finds particular relevance in developing countries like India, which seek inclusive and sustainable growth.

• WEBS OF MEANING: ART AND AESTHETIC VISION IN GEORGE ELIOT’S MIDDLEMARCH

  DOI:DOI:18.A003.aarf.J14I01.010494

Asmita

Abstract: George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-72) stands as a momentous achievement in the marriage of artistic form and aesthetic philosophy. In this paper, I aim to expose the complex play of Elliot’s Art and Aesthetics intertwined with conceptions of Materiality, Morality, Psychology, Symbolism and Theology through which an unparalleled grandeur is added to the text and it earns the status of what Virginia Woolf calls "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people". Being a “treasure house of details”, it seduces and traps the reader eternally. Through meticulous analysis of the novel's treatment of visual art, music, literary production, and architectural space, this study reveals Middlemarch as a meta-aesthetic text. Eliot embeds sophisticated theories of art and beauty within her narrative architecture, transforming the realist novel into a vehicle for aesthetic inquiry that simultaneously theorises and demonstrates artistic excellence. Author’s aesthetic vision transcends mere representation, deploying formal innovation—polyphonic narrative structure, symphonic organisation, and painterly description— to understand nineteenth-century aesthetic debates whilst offering timeless insights into art's moral and social functions. By examining Middlemarch as both aesthetic object and aesthetic theory, this paper demonstrates how Eliot's masterwork remains indispensable towards the argument that true art must unite moral seriousness with formal beauty, individual vision with social responsibility, and idealistic aspiration with empirical truth.