Download or read book Making Up Society written by Philip Fisher and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2010-11-23 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fisher places the work of George Eliot within the great evolution that constitutes the nineteenth-century English novel. He reports not only about her work, but about an evolving complex literary form. Fisher examines Eliot's work as responding to "the loss of society," the breakdown between public life and individua moral history. As trust in the community as a base of moral life weakens, decisive changes occur: the English novel accommodated itself to the disappearance of society and changed from the representation of individuals as members of a social order to the description of the self surrounded by collections of unrelated others.