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1. Introduction 1. Introduction
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2. The Perils of Sermonizing 2. The Perils of Sermonizing
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3. The Nature of Sympathy 3. The Nature of Sympathy
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References References
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Notes Notes
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Literature as Philosophy: Does It Matter That George Eliot Wrote Fiction?
Get accessPatrick Fessenbecker is an associate professor in the Program for Cultures, Civilizations, and Ideas at Bilkent University and a teaching faculty member at the University of Wisconsin. His book Reading Ideas In Victorian Literature: Literary Content as Artistic Experience (Edinburgh 2020) argued for a new theory of literary appreciation, one that sees grasping the ideas in a work of art as a way of enjoying it. His essay “In Defense of Paraphrase” won the Ralph W. Cohen Prize from New Literary History, and his other essays have appeared in journals like ELH, Victorian Studies, and Modern Philology. He is currently at work on a monograph on George Eliot’s moral thought.
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Published:18 July 2023
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Abstract
The great Victorian novelist George Eliot has long been recognized as a major intellectual, and to that extent, the idea that she needs to be or even could be rediscovered in the fashion of many other writers seems odd. Yet because of the disciplinary history that has placed studies of George Eliot primarily in literature departments, there is a kind of philosophical writing about her work that is surprisingly rare: straightforward rational reconstructions that explain her views and her reasons for holding them as charitably as possible. The absence of this scholarship is particularly striking with regard to her theory of sympathy, where philosophical writing has more or less ignored the sophisticated approach that literary criticism has developed for understanding the moral psychology of the distinctive sympathy exemplified by Eliot’s narrators. To that extent, there is perhaps a way in which philosophy has not yet really discovered Eliot’s moral philosophy.
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