George Eliot U.S.: Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Perspectives

Monika Mueller

Jan. 2005 · Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

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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.