Introduction: George Eliot and the Poetics of Disbelief

Abstract

This introduction is for the special issue edited by Hadjiafxendi entitled 'The cultural place of George Eliot's poetry'. This issue tries to reclaim Eliot's place in the literary canon as a poet by exploring the challenges that her poetry posed and still poses to its readers today. All its contributors experiment with different ways of reading Eliot's poems in their own right rather than as narratives that happen to be in poetic form. In so doing, the aim is to sketch out 'an Eliot who is barely visible in her novels'.