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George Eliot and Italy 1998th Edition
Author(s): A. Thompson (Author)
- Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
- Publication Date: December 15, 1997
- Edition: 1998th
- Language: English
- Print length: 253 pages
- ISBN-10: 0333694562
- ISBN-13: 9780333694565
Book Description
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.
Editorial Reviews
Review
‘[A] distinctive contribution to the burgeoning literature on nineteenth-century British enthusiasm for all things Italian…sure to be eagerly devoured accordingly.’ – Literature & History
About the Author
ANDREW THOMPSON
