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'A common humanity is not yet enough': Shadows of the Coming Race in George Eliot's Final Fiction

  • Ortwin de Graef

Date Published:

2 Jan, 2011

Abstract:

It has been said that without George Eliot's last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), "the state of Israel might not exist." In the novel itself, at any rate, the state of Israel only appears as a hazy hypothesis entertained by its narratorial consciousness from within the confines of an implicit European regionalism predicated on English common sense. In Eliot's final fiction, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), the sinister anxieties affecting that common sense in the face of a lurid fantasy of judaeo-techno-capitalist "alienism" of its own making bleed back, generating complications of voice and vision, challenging Eliot's authorship and authority, and straining her text into rhetorical reaction formations indicative of a new crisis in the imagination of human community that all her writing had worked to refine.

 

Ortwin de Graef is Professor of English Literature and Literary Theory at KU Leuven. He is the author of two books on Paul de Man and has published widely on Romantic and post-Romantic writing ranging from Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, and George Eliot through Virginia Woolf and Pearl S. Buck to Hafid Bouazza and Alan Warner. His principal research interests are the Very-Long-Nineteenth-Century ideologies of sympathy, science, and the State reflected and refracted through the transmission technologies of the literary.

 

Updated March 5, 2014

 

Publisher's Version

Volume 9, Issue 1 Literature and Ideology
Last updated on 04/16/2020