Revisiting George Eliot’s Realism

George Eliot’s status as the consummate Victorian realist is the point of departure for this chapter, which addresses some of the major issues and discussions generated by Eliot’s realism as they emerge from her novels, from her non-fiction, and from the varied scholarship on her work. In sections devoted to her visual realism, to the interface between popular and specialised understandings of realism, to the communal form of her realism, and to its ostensible naïveté, the chapter revisits scholarship on these issues and suggest new directions of exploration. Finally, the chapter addresses the under-explored relationship between Eliot’s theories of realism and her practice of it.