.. a monograph like Monika Mueller's is thoroughly welcome. It is concerned with one of the epitomes of mid-Victorian writing, Mary Ann Evans alias George Eliot, and the manifold ways in which her writings enter a nutual interchange with those of her American contemporaries Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Margaret Fuller, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Mueller somewhat overemphatically refuses to align her monograph with traditional influence studies, of which Edward Stokes 1985 monograph Hawthorne's Influence on Dickens and George Eliot provides an example. Yet her study is also that, though in a broader sense than Stokes's in that it steps beyond stylistic comparisions and a comparison of motifs and their treatment. Its direction is that of a comparative study of ideologies as depicted in nineteenth-century literature and the way in which it travels between related, though already noticeably different cultures. This is why her monograph moves convincingly from the still woman theme in Adam Bede and The Scarlet Letter (whose influence on Eliot's first novel is well known) and community in Middlemarch and Beecher Stowe's Oldtown Folks to the British and American views of cultural alerity in the shape of Italy in Eliot's novels, especially Romola, Beecher Stowe's Agnes of Sorrento, and Hawthorne's The Marble Faun. Alterity ultimately becomes the strongest thread of Mueller's monograph in its comparative analysis of the relationship of notions of race, ethnicity, and national identity in Uncle Tom's Cabin and Daniel Deronda.
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