George Eliot’s serious readers have been intrigued by the fact that she declared that she had lost her faith in God and had renounced her hope for a traditional Christian heaven and yet she continued to preach her own version of morality in everything she wrote, to hope for an immortality which allowed her to join an invisible choir which would influence generations to come, and to be concerned about the moral growth of her characters. This is only one of the many compelling contradictions in her life and in her artistry. This volume aims to investigate Eliot’s ethical and artistic principles by defining her moral aesthetic as it relates to her self-concept and exploring Eliot’s narrative decisions and the decisions made by her characters and the circumstances which prompt those choices. Dr. Fulmer includes chapters on her clerical figures and other types of individuals such as musicians, and politicians. Dr. Fulmer also illuminates the paradoxes and contradictions in George Eliot’s life and in her philosophy by focusing on Eliot's use of animals, mirrors, windows, jewelry, wills and other tangible images in her poetry as well as her novels. George Eliot’s Moral Aesthetic contends that everything about her moral philosophy is related to her writing and that everything about her writing is related to her moral philosophy.

The Ethical Vision of George Eliot is one of the first monographs devoted entirely to the ethical thought of George Eliot, a profoundly significant, influential figure not only in nineteenth-century English and European literature, nineteenth-century women’s writing, the history of the novel, and Victorian intellectual culture, but also in the field of literary ethics. Ethics are a predominant theme in Eliot’s fictional and non-fictional writings. Her ethical insights and ideas are a defining element of her greatness as an artist and novelist. Through meticulous close readings of Eliot’s fiction, essays, and letters, The Ethical Vision of George Eliot presents an original, complex definition of her ethical vision as she developed it over the course of her career. It examines major novels like Adam Bede, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda; many of Eliot’s most significant essays; and devotes two entire chapters to Eliot’s final book Impressions of Theophrastus Such, an idiosyncratic collection of character sketches that Eliot scholars have heretofore generally overlooked or ignored. The Ethical Vision of George Eliot demonstrates that Eliot defined her ethical vision alternately in terms of revealing and strengthening a fundamental human communion that links us to other persons, however different and remote from ourselves; and in terms of recognizing and respecting the otherness of other persons, and of the universe more generally, from ourselves. Over the course of her career, Eliot increasingly transitions from the former towards the latter imperative, but she also considerably complicates her conception of otherness, and of what it means to be ethically responsible to it.

Explains how, under the influence of the new ''mental materialism'' that held sway in mid-Victorian scientific and medical thought, the Bront1/2s and George Eliot in their greatest novels broached a radical new form of novelistic moral psychology.

In a probing analysis that has broad implications for theories of reading, Bernard J. Paris explores how personal needs and changes in his own psychology have affected his responses to George Eliot over the years. Having lost his earlier enthusiasm for her "Religion of Humanity," he now appreciates the psychological intuitions that are embodied in her brilliant portraits of characters and relationships. Concentrating on Eliot's most impressive psychological novels, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, Paris focuses on her detailed portrayals of major characters in an effort to recover her intuitions and appreciate her mimetic achievement. He argues that although she intended for her characters to provide confirmation of her views, she was instead led to deeper, more enduring truths, although she did not consciously comprehend the discoveries she had made. Like her characters, Paris argues, these truths must be disengaged from her rhetoric in order to be perceived.

This book examines George Eliot's understanding of money and economics within the context of the ethics of economics in nineteenth-century England.

Though underexplored in contemporary scholarship, the Victorian attempts to turn aesthetics into a science remain one of the most fascinating aspects of that era. In The Outward Mind, Benjamin Morgan approaches this period of innovation as an important origin point for current attempts to understand art or beauty using the tools of the sciences. Moving chronologically from natural theology in the early nineteenth century to laboratory psychology in the early twentieth, Morgan draws on little-known archives of Victorian intellectuals such as William Morris, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and others to argue that scientific studies of mind and emotion transformed the way writers and artists understood the experience of beauty and effectively redescribed aesthetic judgment as a biological adaptation. Looking beyond the Victorian period to humanistic critical theory today, he also shows how the historical relationship between science and aesthetics could be a vital resource for rethinking key concepts in contemporary literary and cultural criticism, such as materialism, empathy, practice, and form. At a moment when the tumultuous relationship between the sciences and the humanities is the subject of ongoing debate, Morgan argues for the importance of understanding the arts and sciences as incontrovertibly intertwined.

Presents a brief biography of George Eliot, critical views and plot summaries of four of her novels, and an index of themes and ideas.