Publisher's Synopsis
An exploration of the critical paradigms that have shaped the varied reception offered to the fiction of George Eliot. The study is based on contemporary theories of literary criticism, with particular reference to the work of Jauss, providing insights not only into the work of George Eliot, but also into current critical debates about literary history.;The book begins by offering extended and perceptive discussions of the Victorian reviews of "Adam Bede" and "Daniel Deronda", before examining the critical opinions of Henry James. The author then turns to more recent critics, in particular, Virginia Woolf, F.R. Leavis, Barbara Hardy and J. Hillis Miller, and includes Marxist and feminist accounts of Eliot; there is also an in-depth reappraisal of Eliot's novel "Felix Holt, the Radical"
