A RECEPTION-HISTORY OF GEORGE ELIOT'S FICTION

The work of Hans Robert Jauss emphasizes that literary interpretation is unavoidably contingent upon the historical horizon of the interpreter, and regards literary history as the study of the changing horizons of expectation which determine the way that particular literary works are concretized by historical readers. The introduction to the thesis outlines Jauss's theoretical work in the context of contemporary literary theory, and sets forth the terms of an investigation into the history of the reception of Eliot's fiction.;Henry James was ambivalent towards Eliot, and his feeling that she was insufficiently an artist was turned into a dogma by male critics early in the twentieth century, when her reputation reached its lowest ebb. Virginia Woolf's essay argues against this dogma, prefiguring contemporary feminist criticism.;F. R. Leavis asserted that Eliot was a great artist, but his influential revaluation emphasizes the English and "organic" aspect of her work. Like Barbara Hardy, Leavis devalues the cognitive dimension of fiction. Marxist critics have attacked the Eliot of Leavis's creation, but feminist criticism and historians of ideas have uncovered a more radical George Eliot and have emphasized the cognitive aspect of her work. This is illustrated by a reading of Felix Holt. Deconstruction claims to dismantle George Eliot's myths of totality, but a reading of Middlemarch shows that J. Hillis Miller may have underestimated Eliot's skepticism about such myths.;Eliot's aesthetic of fiction shows a tension between a commitment to "realism" and a desire to teach by aesthetic means. This tension is subsequently thematized in her fiction. Thus Adam Bede was read by many Victorian readers as a work which, for all its novelty, reinforced a Victorian ideology of both fictional narrative and middle-class life, whereas some readers were disturbed by details which can form the basis of a deconstructive or feminist reading of the novel. A similar duality is present in Daniel Deronda, but the more radical deviations of that novel produced a less favourable response in Victorian critics.