George Eliot and Italy [Hardcover]

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.Acknowledgements - Abbreviations - Introduction - Dante, the Risorgimento and the British: the Italian Background - George Eliot's Contact with Italian Life and Culture 1840-1861 - George Eliot's Italian Exile in 'Mr Gilfil's Love Story' - George Eliot's Italian Mythmaking in Romola - Dante in Romola - Dante and Moral Choice in Felix Holt, The Radical - Italian Culture and Influences in Middlemarch - Gwendolen's 'other road': Dante in Daniel Deronda - Italian Poetry and Music in Daniel Deronda - Daniel Deronda, Italian Prophecy, Dante and George Eliot - Notes - Bibliography

'[A] distinctive contribution to the burgeoning literature on nineteenth-century British enthusiasm for all things Italian...sure to be eagerly devoured accordingly.' - Literature & History

ANDREW THOMPSON