George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

Nathan Uglow (Trinity All Saints, Leeds)
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Daniel Deronda

was George Eliot's last major novel and also her most ambitious. It represents a marked change of perspective from her previous work, replacing the fixed provincial setting with a pan-European setting that spans the social spectrum from princesses and dukes to rural village communities and impoverished families living in slum conditions. Society at large is no longer glimpsed through the prism of a rural village; a greater world experienced only insofar as it disturbs a pre-constituted harmonious community. Globalization is taken as the new fact of reality and rootlessness is now the defining condition of her fictional world. Correspondingly, the task of her lead characters becomes that of putting down firm roots and fixing the proper coordinates of life rather than that of…

1996 words

Citation: Uglow, Nathan. "Daniel Deronda". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 June 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5744, accessed 23 April 2024.]

5744 Daniel Deronda 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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