George Eliot's dialogue with history

Beginning with Romola, George Eliot's mode of literary realism became increasingly historicized. Eliot's notebooks reveal the vast quantity of historical research that preceded the composition of her last four novels; the texts themselves, with their elaborately constructed backgrounds of historical events, allude constantly and insistently to social and political conditions as determining factors in the fortunes of their fictional protagonists. This intensified commitment to historical truth generates multiple implied meta-narratives of historical development: narratives of progress, decline, cyclicality, providentiality, and randomness, often overlapping and co-existing in the same text. This dissertation explores the interplay of fictional text and historical subtext in Romola, Felix Holt, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda .