George Eliot And Italy » (REV)

This study considers George Eliot's novels in relation to Dante and to nineteenth-century Italian culture during the italian national revival and shows how these helped shape her fiction. Thompson argues that Elliot was able to draw selectively on a powerful Risorgimento mythology of national regeneration and that her engagement with the work of Dante Alighieri increases steadily in her later novels, where the Divine Comedy becomes a sustaining metaphor for Eliot's meliorist vision and for her theme of moral growth through suffering.

Booknews

Taking a broadly chronological approach, this study reviews Eliot's contact with Dante and Italian literature in the context of a wider Italian culture during the 19th-century national revival, the . Demonstrates Eliot's deepening engagement with the work of Dante through close readings of several novels, and argues that the underpins the moral world of her novels and provides a sustaining metaphor for their central theme of moral growth through suffering. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.