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This collection brings together new articles by leading scholars who reappraise George Eliot in her bicentenary year as an interdisciplinary thinker and writer for our times. Here, researchers, students, teachers and the general public gain access to new perspectives on Eliot´s vast interests and knowledge, informed by the nineteenth-century British culture in which she lived. Examining Eliot´s wide-ranging engagement with Victorian historical research, periodicals, poetry, mythology, natural history, realism, the body, gender relations, and animal studies, these essays construct an exciting new interdisciplinary agenda for future Eliot studies.

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1. Introduction - Jean Arnold and Lila Harper.- 2. "A Thousand Tit-Bits": George Eliot and the NMew Journalism - Alexis Easley.- 3. George Eliot´s Literary Legacy: Poetic Perception and Self Fashioning in the 1870s - Wendy S. Williams.- 4. George Eliot as "worthy scholar": Note Taking and the Composition of Romola - Andrew Thompson.- 5. Egyptian Mythology in Eliot´s Major Works - Molly Youngkin.- 6. Organic Realism in Middlemarch - Jean Arnold.- 7. Eliot´s Natural History - Lila Harper.- 8. Handling George Eliot´s Fiction - Peter Capuano.- 9. "It was all over with Wildfire": Horse Accidents in George Eliot´s Fiction - Nancy Henry.- 10. The Function of Dogs in George Eliot´s Fiction - Sarah Hakansson.- 11. The Ambivalence of Water in George Eliot´s The Mill on the Floss - Odile Rivalain Boucher.- 12. Hints of Same-Sex Attraction and Transgender Trains in George Eliot´s Characters - Constance Fulmer.- 13. "Upright Realism": The Influence of George Eliot on Polish Literature - Alexandra Budrewicz.

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Jean Arnold taught in the Department of English at California State University, San Bernardino, California and at Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA. She is author of Victorian Jewelry, Identity, and the Novel: Prisms of Culture (2011).

Lila Marz Harper is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at Central Washington University, USA and Thesis Editor for the Graduate School. She is author of Solitary Travelers: Nineteenth-Century Women´s Travel Narratives and the Scientific Vocation (2001). She edited the Broadview edition of Edwin Abbott´s Flatland (2009) and is a Distinguished Bibliographic Indexer and Section Head for the MLA International Bibliography.

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