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GEORGE ELIOT'S EVANGELICAL INSIGHT: CLOSE CONTACT AND REALIZING VIEWS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 August 2017

Erin Nerstad
Erin Nerstad*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Extract

Readers have long noted the pervasiveness of sympathy in George Eliot's work. But why always sympathy? One cannot fully answer this question without attending to a crucial and yet still understudied context for Eliot's work: evangelicalism. It is from evangelical thought and practice that she gleaned the concept of what I will call sympathetic “insight,” which evangelicals privileged for its ability to “see” the real and to move between the dichotomous barriers of the in/visible and in/external. I want to suggest that even after Eliot no longer found compelling its accompanying theology, sympathetic “insight” persisted in her imagination as a way to see into and within her realist fictional worlds.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , September 2017 , pp. 569 - 591
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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