The Oxford Handbook of George Eliot

The Oxford Handbook of George Eliot is the most wide-ranging collection of essays on Eliot’s life and works published to date. Part I, on Eliot’s ‘Life and Networks’, explores her personal and intellectual relationships with her contemporaries. Part II, ‘Influences’, gives unprecedented attention to Eliot’s close engagement with earlier poets, dramatists, 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 Part III of the volume is unique in attending closely to the full range of Eliot’s unpublished and published works: chapters on each of the novels make a renewed case for the centrality of Eliot’s works to current scholarly debates about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, while 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 close-read (such as the notebooks, manuscripts, letters, and journals). Part IV, ‘Form’, gives particularly close scrutiny to those aspects of literary form which characterise Eliot’s writing, such as her preoccupation with genre and her handling of voice. Finally, Part V, ‘Afterlives’, assesses the complexity of Eliot’s legacy (formally as well as ideologically) for later writers. George Eliot repeatedly stressed the aesthetic and ethical importance of viewing subjects from different perspectives: The Oxford Handbook of George Eliot presents over fifty perspectives on this major nineteenth-century writer.

Art · Art history · George (robot) · History · Modernist Literature and Criticism

• Earnest Hypocrisy

  Open Access•Houliang Chen, You Zhang et al.•Religions•2026

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