“A Common Humanity Is Not Yet Enough”: Shadows of the Coming Race in George Eliot’s Final Fiction

Abstract

It has been said that without George Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), “the state of Israel might not exist.” In the novel itself, at any rate, the state of Israel only appears as a hazy hypothesis entertained by its narratorial consciousness from within the confines of an implicit European regionalism predicated on English common sense. In Eliot’s final fiction, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), the sinister anxieties affecting that common sense in the face of a lurid fantasy of judaeo-techno-capitalist “alienism” of its own making bleed back, generating complications of voice and vision, challenging Eliot’s authorship and authority, and straining her text into rhetorical reaction formations indicative of a new crisis in the imagination of human community that all her writing had worked to refine.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.