George Eliot's Science Fiction

George Eliot's recourse to comparative mythology and biology in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda engages a conjectural history of symbolic language shared by the Victorian human and natural sciences. Troubling the formation of scientific knowledge as a progression from figural to literal usage, Eliot's novels activate an oscillation between registers, in which linguistic events of metaphor become narrative events of organic metamorphosis. REPRESENTATIONS 125. Winter 2014 (C) The Regents of the University of California.