German Elements in the Fiction of George Eliot, Gissing, and Meredith

George Eliot, Gissing and Meredith are the nineteenth-century British novelists who, in their fiction, made the most significant and sub- stantial use of German material. The function of this material is two- fold, relating both to the life presented and to the presentation. An elucidation of the German references adds not only to a fuller under- standig of the individual novels, but also of the author's theory and practice of fiction, and of one of the experimental tendencies in the «wide» tradition of the English novel.