HumanitiesLinguisticsLiteratureComparative MythologyLiterary StudiesMythologyFigurative LanguageMythic ArchetypesPoeticsScience FictionHistory Of Scientific KnowledgeLiteral ReadingLiteral SenseMetamorphosisMythological TextsScientific Knowledge ConstructionScientific MetaphorSymbolic Language
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.