A Companion to George Eliot - Paperback

by Amanda Anderson (Editor), Harry E. Shaw (Editor)

This collection offers students and scholars of Eliot's work a timely critical reappraisal of her corpus, including her poetry and non-fiction, reflecting the latest developments in literary criticism. It features innovative analysis -exploring the relation between Eliot's Victorian intellectual sensibilities and those of our own era.

• A comprehensive collection of essays written by leading Eliot scholars
• Offers a contemporary reappraisals of Eliot's work reflecting a broad range of current academic interests, including religion, science, ethics, politics, and aesthetics
• Reflects the very latest developments in literary scholarship
• Traces the revealing links between Eliot's Victorian intellectual -concerns and those of today

Back Jacket

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.

Author Biography

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.