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 Eliot 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.
- ISBN13 9780333694565
- Publish Date 15 December 1997
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Palgrave Macmillan
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 243
- Language English