George Eliot's Intellectual Life
Cambridge University Press, 2/18/2010
EAN 9780521117364, ISBN10: 0521117364
Hardcover, 310 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
It is well known that George Eliot's intelligence and her wide knowledge of literature, history, philosophy and religion shaped her fiction, but until now no study has followed the development of her thinking through her whole career. This intellectual biography traces the course of that development from her initial Christian culture, through her loss of faith and working out of a humanistic and cautiously progressive world view, to the thought-provoking achievements of her novels. It focuses on her responses to her reading in her essays, reviews and letters as well as in the historical pictures of Romola, the political implications of Felix Holt, the comprehensive view of English society in Middlemarch, and the visionary account of personal inspiration in Daniel Deronda. This portrait of a major Victorian intellectual is an important addition to our understanding of Eliot's mind and works, as well as of her place in nineteenth-century British culture.
Introduction
1. The 'evangelical'
starting out in a Christian culture
2. The apostate
moving beyond the Christian mythos
3. The journalist
editing, reviewing, shaping a worldview
4. The Germanist
balancing the counterweight of German thinkers
5. The novelist
mixing realism, naturalism and myth-making
6. The historian
tracking the idealistic - utopian and national - in Romola and The Spanish Gypsy
7. The 'radical'
taking an anti-political stance in Felix Holt
8. The encyclopaedist
transcending the past in Middlemarch
9. The visionary
transmitting ideals in Daniel Deronda
10. The intellectual
cultural critique in Impressions of Theophrastus Such
Works cited
Index.