George Eliot and Italy

by Andrew Thompson and Graham R. Thompson

This study considers George Eliot's novels in relation to Dante and to nineteenth-century Italian culture during the Italian national revival and shows how these helped shape her fiction. Thompson argues that Eliot was able to draw selectively on a powerful Risorgimento mythology of national regeneration and that her engagement with the work of Dante Alighieri increases steadily in her later novels, where the Divine Comedy becomes a sustaining metaphor for Eliot's meliorist vision and for her theme of moral growth through suffering.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312176511
• ISBN13: 9780312176518
• Release Date: February 1998
• Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
• Length: 243 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.8"