A Companion to George Eliot

George Eliot is widely viewed as the finest English novelist of the nineteenth century, the era in which the form reached its zenith. Her voluminous output, matched by an equally unbounded intellectual depth and nuanced social commentary, brims with insight into every aspect of culture and society, moving effortlessly between topics including religion, ethics, the law, finance, politics, science and aesthetics. The essays in this collection offer students and scholars of her work a timely critical reappraisal of her corpus, including her poetry and non–fiction, that reflects the latest developments in literary criticism. The contributors, all leading Eliot scholars, draw on some of the most innovative work in the field, exploring the relation between Eliot’s concerns and those of our own era, and  assessing her work in the context of contemporary academic interests such as religion and secularism, internationalism and cosmopolitanism, and ethics and aesthetics. 

Introduction 1
Amanda Anderson and Harry E. Shaw

Part I: Imaginative Form and Literary Context 19

1 Eliot and Narrative 21
Monika Fludernik

2 Metaphor and Masque 35
Michael Wood

3 “It Is of Little Use for Me to Tell You”: George Eliot’s Narrative Refusals 46
Robyn Warhol

4 Surprising Realism 62
Caroline Levine

5 Two Flowers: George Eliot’s Diagrams and the Modern Novel 76
John Plotz

Part II: Works 91

6 Scenes of Clerical Life and Silas Marner: Moral Fables 93
Stefanie Markovits

7 Adam Bede: History’s Maggots 105
Rae Greiner

8 The Mill on the Floss and “The Lifted Veil”: Prediction, Prevention, Protection 117
Adela Pinch

9 Romola: Historical Narration and the Communicative Dynamics of Modernity 129
David Wayne Thomas

10 Felix Holt: Love in the Time of Politics 141
David Kurnick

11 Middlemarch: January in Lowick 153
Andrew H. Miller

12 Daniel Deronda: Late Form, or After Middlemarch 166
Alex Woloch

13 Poetry: The Unappreciated Eliot 178
Herbert F. Tucker

14 Essays: Essay v. Novel (Eliot, Aloof) 192
Jeff Nunokawa

15 Impressions of Theophrastus Such: “Not a Story” 204
James Buzard

Part III: Life and Reception 217

16 The Reception of George Eliot 219
James Eli Adams

17 George Eliot Among Her Contemporaries: A Life Apart 233
Lynn Voskuil

18 Feminist George Eliot Comes from the United States 247
Alison Booth

19 Transatlantic Eliot: African American Connections 262
Daniel Hack

Part IV: Eliot in Her Time and Ours: Intellectual and Cultural Contexts 277

20 Sympathy and the Basis of Morality 279
T. H. Irwin

21 George Eliot, Spinoza, and the Emotions 294
Isobel Armstrong

22 George Eliot and the Law 309
Jan–Melissa Schramm

23 George Eliot and Finance 323
Nancy Henry

24 George Eliot and Politics 338
Carolyn Lesjak

25 Imagining Locality and Affiliation: George Eliot’s Villages 353
Josephine McDonagh

26 George Eliot’s Liberalism 370
Daniel S. Malachuk

27 George Eliot: Gender and Sexuality 385
Laura Green

28 The Cosmopolitan Eliot 400
Bruce Robbins

29 The Continental Eliot 413
Hina Nazar

30 George Eliot and Secularism 428
Simon During

31 Living Theory: Personality and Doctrine in Eliot 442
Amanda Anderson

32 George Eliot and the Sciences of Mind: The Silence that Lies on the Other Side of Roar 457
Jill L. Matus

33 George Eliot and the Science of the Human 471
Ian Duncan

34 Eliot, Evolution, and Aesthetics 486
Jonathan Loesberg

Index 500

Amanda Anderson is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University, USA, and Director of the School of Criticism and Theory. Prior to joining the Brown faculty in 2012, she taught at Johns Hopkins University, where she served as department chair from 2003–2009. She is the author of The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (2006), The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (2001), and Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (1993). Prof Anderson has also co–edited, with Joseph Valente, Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle (2002).

Harry E. Shaw is Professor of English at Cornell University, USA, where he has been teaching since 1978. Specializing in nineteenth–century English novels and narrative poetics, he explores the influence of the British novel on the rise of historical consciousness in Europe, and the ways in which novels help us conceptualize our place in history. He is the author of The Forms of Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and his Successors (1983) and Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (1999), and co–author of Reading the Nineteenth–Century Novel: Austen to Eliot 2008.