Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Albrecht, Thomas

Titel

The Ethical Vision of George Eliot

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

Oxford: Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The Ethical Vision of George Eliot is one of the first monographs devoted entirely to the ethical thought of George Eliot, a profoundly significant, influential figure in nineteenth-century English and European literature, nineteenth-century women's writing, the history of the novel, Victorian intellectual culture, and also in the field of literary ethics. Ethics are a predominant theme in Eliot's fictional and non-fictional writings. Her ethical insights and ideas are a defining element of her greatness as an artist and novelist. Through meticulous close readings of Eliot's fiction, essays, and letters, The Ethical Vision of George Eliot presents an original, complex definition of her ethical ideas as she developed them over the course of her career. It examines major novels like Adam Bede, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda; many of Eliot's most significant essays; and devotes two entire chapters to Eliot's final book Impressions of Theophrastus Such, an idiosyncratic collection of character sketches that Eliot scholars have heretofore generally overlooked or ignored. The Ethical Vision of George Eliot demonstrates that Eliot defined her ethics alternately in terms of revealing and strengthening a fundamental human communion that links us to other persons, however different and remote they might be from ourselves; and in terms of recognizing and respecting the otherness of other persons, and of the universe more generally, from ourselves. Over the course of her career, Eliot increasingly transitions from the former toward the latter imperative, but she also considerably complicates her conception of otherness, and of what it means to be ethically responsible to it.