George Eliot's work has been subject to a wide range of critical questioning, but most of her critics relate her substantially to a Victorian context and intellectual framework. This book seeks to demonstrate that more thany any of her Victorian contemporaries she anticipates significant aspects of writing in the twentieth and indeed twenty-first century in regard to both art and philosophy. Although rightly associated with "realism" her concept of the real is philosophically informed and her writing is also highly allusive.

This new book presents a series of linked essays exploring...