A Companion to George Eliot

George Eliot is widely viewed as the finest English novelist of the nineteenth century, the era in which the form reached its zenith. Her voluminous output, matched by an equally unbounded intellectual depth and nuanced social commentary, brims with insight into every aspect of culture and society, moving effortlessly between topics including religion, ethics, the law, finance, politics, science and aesthetics. The essays in this collection offer students and scholars of her work a timely critical reappraisal of her corpus, including her poetry and non-fiction, that reflects the latest developments in literary criticism. The contributors, all leading Eliot scholars, draw on some of the most innovative work in the field, exploring the relation between Eliot’s concerns and those of our own era, and  assessing her work in the context of contemporary academic interests such as religion and secularism, internationalism and cosmopolitanism, and ethics and aesthetics.