ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the cross-cultural implications of the George Eliot-Schiller relationship: how Eliot negotiates the transposition' — or rather the transculturation — of German cultural concepts and values into English cultural soil, and transcodes Schillerian moral idealism in such a way as to make it accessible to her reading public. A cross-cultural discourse distinguishes itself from assimilation, incorporation, and appropriation as it organizes an interchange between cultures in which the cultures concerned will not stay the same. Theorists of intertextuality from Barthes and Kristeva to Bakhtin, Riffaterre and Culler have over the years developed an impressive array of methodologies. The chapter uses these studies selectively in its discussion of Eliot and Schiller. Like Schiller, Eliot is fascinated by the complex psychological make-up of her characters and the stealth with which their weaknesses in combination with slowly encroaching circumstances trap them into positions they had never envisaged, exposing the gap between ideal intention and its realization.
