1. The Historical Genre: Critical and Practical Discourse

George Eliot, Middlemarch

George Eliot framed Middlemarch as an inquiry into the determining effect of "the conditions of an imperfect social state" upon the individual's nature and potential.[10] She went on, in an oft-quoted passage, to explain her novelistic practice to be a consequence of historical change:


Eliot's "particular web" is less an adequate description of her literary method than it is a defense of her right, as a "belated historian," to revolutionize her method. Contrary to her assertion, Eliot does disperse her light "over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe." For all the self-deprecatory language of contraction and diminution, Eliot assumes an authority equal to Fielding's. She can do so because, as she forcibly asserts, her universe is not Fielding's; the times demand different spatial, chronological, and economic measures. Thus it is history that Eliot calls upon to prove that she need not parrot Fielding to follow Fielding. It is history that enables her to rival his novelistic practice by altering the form of the novel. Similarly, in painting in mocking strokes the portrait of a colossal, patriarchal Fielding presiding over Tom Jones, Eliot asserts her right as a "belated historian" to revolutionize the novel's content. The domestic life of Dorothea Brooke, an obscure, would-be St. Theresa, contains more of import to Eliot's historical moment than the misadventures of Fielding's well-intentioned but irresponsible young man.

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