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.

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.

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George Eliot was one of the great thinkers of her time, a figure central to the main currents of thought and belief in the nineteenth century. Yet when this distinguished public intellectual turned to fiction writing at the age of thirty-six, she regarded it not as a lesser pursuit, but as the distillation of all of her knowledge and ideas. For Eliot, fiction enabled the consideration of life 'in its highest complexity', and had the capacity not merely to elicit, but actually to create, moral sentiment by surprising readers into the recognition of realities other than their own. In this new study, Pauline Nestor offers a challenging reassessment of Eliot's contribution to the critical debates, both of her age and of her own era. In particular, she examines the author's literary expolration of ethics, especially in relation to the negotiation of difference. Nestor argues compellingly that, through a reading of their sophisticated drama of otherness, Eliot's novels can be seen as freshly relevant to contemporary theoretical debates in feminism, moral philosophy, post-colonial studies and psychoanalysis. Covering the writer's complete body of major fiction, this is an indispensable voume for anyone studying the work of one of the most important and influential novelists of the nineteenth century.