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- Title
George Eliot and the Cosmopolitan Cynic.
- Authors
SMALL, HELEN
- Abstract
"George Eliot and the Cosmopolitan Cynic" explores the contribution made to Eliot's thinking about cosmopolitanism by her long-standing philosophical and stylistic attraction to cynicism. Middlemarch (1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876) have to date dominated critical debate about Eliot's engagement with the idea of a cosmopolitan ethical detachment. This essay focuses instead on two more experimental pieces of writing that came before and after the major novels: The Lifted Veil (1859) and Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879). It argues that in these works--both "uncharacteristic," but markedly distinct in style and ethical motivation--Eliot tested the power of cynicism to expose difficulties in the way of an ethical cosmopolitanism and operate as a reality check on all prescriptive idealisms.
- Subjects
ELIOT, George, 1819-1880; LIFTED Veil, The (Book); IMPRESSIONS of Theophrastus Such (Book); COSMOPOLITANISM; CYNICISM in literature; ETHICS in literature; SOCIAL attitudes in literature; LITERARY criticism; 19TH century English literature; VICTORIAN (Literary period)
- Publication
Victorian Studies, 2012, Vol 55, Issue 1, p85
- ISSN
0042-5222
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.2979/victorianstudies.55.1.85