George Eliot's Compact Panorama

Abstract The article makes a case for the importance of relations of scale to Eliot's realism by examining how the panorama upended pictorial perspective to show that Eliot affirmed the representational power of realism even as she dramatized its shortcomings. As a large-scale painting, the panorama was not merely realistic, it was immersive. In Eliot's hands, the novel form is generously wide-angled even as that impulse to capaciousness is tempered by the intimate, local focus of Middlemarch. Making the intimate expansive and the expansive intimate creates a familiar fictional world even as it calls attention to the novel's very status as fiction.