George Eliot and the Cosmopolitan Cynic
"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&#...
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| Format: | Journal article |
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Indiana University Press
2012
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| Summary: | "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. |
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