Download or read book George Eliot and Victorian Historiography written by Neil McCaw and published by Springer. This book was released on 2000-07-25 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new study of George Eliot's fiction, textual attempts to imagine a coherent and unified national past are seen as producing a contradictory vision of Englishness. It is a historiographical national identity, constructed in the image of predominant, and conflicting, trends in the Victorian writing of history. The inherent uncertainty caused by the shift between different perceptions of English history leads, in the later fiction, to an abandonment of contemporaneous grand narratives. The consequence is a history that anticipates a more modern, radical philosophy of history.