Publisher's Synopsis
For the last two or three decades, Auguste Comte's Positivism has been viewed as an only minor influence on George Eliot's literary productions. The present study wishes to counter this critical stance by providing an extensive summary of Comte's philosophy and its historical background, showing Comte and George Eliot to have been part of the same current in European thought. George Eliot's view of herself as artist striving for the meliorisation of society and her concept of moral choice in a rigidly determined universe - which inform all of her novels - are related to her also Comtean background. In the subsequent analyses of her novels is pointed out how and to what extent Positivism and Comte's Religion of Humanity influenced George Eliot's art.
