The Oxford Handbook of George Eliot

George Eliot repeatedly stressed the aesthetic and ethical importance of viewing subjects from different perspectives: The Oxford Handbook of George Eliot presents fifty-two perspectives on this major nineteenth-century writer. Together, the chapters provide the most wide-ranging collection of essays on Eliot's life and works published to date. While providing fresh perspectives on the important themes running through Eliot's works, the volume is distinctive in placing a concern with literary form at its heart. Part I questions longstanding conceptions of Eliot as a figure isolated by scandal by exploring her personal and intellectual relationships with her contemporaries. Part II focuses on Eliot's close engagement with earlier poets, dramatists, and novelists, as well as with painting, sculpture, and music, and in so doing probes Eliot's interest in the nature of influence itself. Part III explores the full range of Eliot's unpublished and published works: chapters on each of the novels make a renewed case for the centrality of Eliot's works to current scholarly debates about nineteenth-century literature; other chapters offer ways into texts that have either been neglected (such as the novellas and poetry) or more often mined for biographical and historical contexts than given a close reading (such as the notebooks, manuscripts, letters, and journals). Part IV gives close scrutiny to those aspects of literary form which characterise Eliot's writing, particularly her preoccupation with genre and her handling of voice, both that of her narrators and her characters. Part V assesses the complexity of Eliot's legacy for later writers, concluding with five shorter essays which tackle the nature and impact of the enduring cultural status of Middlemarch as a (often declared the) 'great English novel'.