George Eliot and Italy
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.
Keywords
Literary CriticismPoetryFictionSocial ScienceSociologyModern19th CenturyAncient & ClassicalEuropeanLanguage Arts & DisciplinesAnthropologyCultural & Social
1997Book
Author(s)Andrew Thompson
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan UK
ISBN9780333694565
LanguageEnglish
