Download or read book George Eliot and Italy written by A. Thompson and published by Springer. This book was released on 1997-12-15 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study considers George Eliot's novels in relation to Dante and to nineteenth-century Italian culture during the Italian national revival and shows how these helped shape her fiction. Thompson argues that Eliot was able to draw selectively on a powerful Risorgimento mythology of national regeneration and that her engagement with the work of Dante Alighieri increases steadily in her later novels, where the Divine Comedy becomes a sustaining metaphor for Eliot's meliorist vision and for her theme of moral growth through suffering.