This book is based on a conference held in Warwick in July 1995. It is a collection of essays which explore various aspects of George Eliot's relation to the literature and culture of Continental Europe. The essays range widely over the novelist's life and work, examining her Journals and Impressions of Theophratus Such as well as her novels, and focusing on different countries and cultures, including not only France, Germany and Italy, but also Holland and Spain. Some essays examine the complex general issues of language and culture raised in her work, while others concentrate on her response to specific European writers and texts. There are investigations of intertextualities and possibilities of influence, as well as contextual discussions and comparative readings of her novels alongside works by European writers. The overall effect is to illuminate her writing by setting it in the wider European context which, with her knowledge of languages, her travels and her extraordinary wide reading, she knew so well.

This book is based on a conference held in Warwick in July 1995. It is a collection of essays which explore various aspects of George Eliot's relation to the literature and culture of Continental Europe. The essays range widely over the novelist's life and work, examining her Journals and Impressions of Theophratus Such as well as her novels, and focusing on different countries and cultures, including not only France, Germany and Italy, but also Holland and Spain. Some essays examine the complex general issues of language and culture raised in her work, while others concentrate on her response to specific European writers and texts. There are investigations of intertextualities and possibilities of influence, as well as contextual discussions and comparative readings of her novels alongside works by European writers. The overall effect is to illuminate her writing by setting it in the wider European context which, with her knowledge of languages, her travels and her extraordinary wide reading, she knew so well.

George Eliot (born Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880) was one of the most important writers of the European nineteenth century, as well as a pioneering translator of challenging and controversial Continental thinkers, and an influential editor and essayist. Although such novels of provincial life as Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch have seen her characterised as a thoroughly English writer, her reception and immersion in the literary, intellectual and political life of Europe was remarkable. Written by a team of leading international scholars, The Reception of George Eliot in Europe is the first comprehensive and systematic survey of Eliot's place in European culture. Exploring Eliot's deep knowledge of German literature and thought, her galvanizing influence on women novelists and translators in countries as diverse as Sweden and Spain, her travels in Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Lands, Italy, and Spain and her friendship with leading figures such as Mazzini, Turgenev, and Liszt, this study reveals her full stature as a cosmopolitan writer and thinker. A film of her Italian Renaissance novel Romola was one of the first to circulate in Europe. Including an historical timeline and a comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources and translations, The Reception of George Eliot in Europe is an essential reference resource for anyone working in the field of Victorian Literature or the European nineteenth century.

From 1854 to 1855, George Eliot spent eight months in Germany, a period that marked the start of her life with George Lewes. Though Eliot documented this journey more extensively than any other, it has remained an under-researched part of Eliot's biography. In her meticulously documented and engaging book, Gerlinde Röder-Bolton draws on Eliot's own writings, as well as on extensive original research in German archives and libraries, to provide the most thorough account yet published of the couple's visit. Rich in historical, social, and cultural detail, George Eliot in Germany, 1854-55 not only records the couple's travels but supplies a context for their encounters with people and places. In the process, Röder-Bolton shows how the crossing of geographical boundaries may be read as symbolic of Eliot's transition from single woman to social outcast and from translator and critic to writer of fiction.

Reading George Eliot as a European novelist among other European novelists, John Rignall explores her use of European travel, scenes and locations in her fiction and also places her novels in conversation with the work of other major European writers. Throughout the book, Rignall shows Eliot's engagement with the cultures of France and Germany, suggestively making the case that Eliot's novels belong to the tradition of the European novel that descends from Cervantes. Rignall develops the fundamental theme of Eliot's position as a European novelist in chapters that explore the significance of Eliot's first visit to Germany with G. H. Lewes, Eliot's ideas on the cultural differences between French and German writing, the incidental part travel plays in novels such as Daniel Deronda and Middlemarch, the role of European landscapes in her fiction, the dialogical relationship between Eliot and Balzac, comparisons between Middlemarch and Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and connections between the novels of Eliot, Gottfried Keller and Theodor Fontane. Daniel Deronda is examined both within the wider context of European Jewish life and as part of a tradition of French novels that harkens back to Balzac and anticipates Proust. Rignall's final chapter takes up Nietzsche's notorious criticism of Eliot in Twilight of the Idols, showing that Eliot, with her sceptical intelligence, insight into the essentially metaphorical nature of language, and grasp of modernity, has something in common with this philosophical iconoclast.

George Eliot U.S. demonstrates the complex and reciprocal relationship between George Eliot's fiction and the writings of her major American contemporaries, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The book also traces Eliot's influence on subsequent American fiction. The introductory section raises methodological questions concerning influence and intertextuality and addresses the mutual reception of European and American social and cultural discourses in order to illuminate culturally motivated divergences and convergences in the authors' presentation of gender, race, and national and ethnic alterity. The book's main body discusses Eliot's and the American writers' depiction of domestic social discourses on gender, religion, and community, and analyzes their depiction of the cultural alterity of Italy. It also focuses on Eliot's and Stowe's different attitudes toward race (and nation building), and discusses the parallels between the kabbalistic passages of Daniel Deronda and American transcendentalist thought. and social life in works by later writers such as Cynthia Ozick and John Irving. Monika Mueller teaches American and English literature at the University of Cologne.

From 1854 to 1855, George Eliot spent eight months in Germany, a period that marked the start of her life with George Lewes. Though Eliot documented this journey more extensively than any other, it has remained an under-researched part of Eliot's biography. In her meticulously documented and engaging book, Gerlinde Röder-Bolton draws on Eliot's own writings, as well as on extensive original research in German archives and libraries, to provide the most thorough account yet published of the couple's visit. Rich in historical, social, and cultural detail, George Eliot in Germany, 1854-55 not only records the couple's travels but supplies a context for their encounters with people and places. In the process, Röder-Bolton shows how the crossing of geographical boundaries may be read as symbolic of Eliot's transition from single woman to social outcast and from translator and critic to writer of fiction.