Reading Dante with George Eliot and Co.

Abstract This short article approaches intertextuality as a network, as a form of ‘reading with’ and in company which is inevitably complex, mediated and fragmentary. It takes as its primary example a chapter from George Eliot’s last novel Daniel Deronda (1876) in which Dante is explicitly present: on the one hand, as the words for a song from Gioachino Rossini’s opera Otello (1816); on the other, via a paraphrase by Alfred, Lord Tennyson placed as the chapter’s epigraph. This example confirms Caroline Levine’s argument about transnational ‘networks allow[ing] us to reconceive what is proper to Victorian literature’, so as to include Dante, for example (Levine, ‘From Nation to Network’, Victorian Studies, 55.4 (2013), 647–66 (p. 664)). Yet it also raises vital and even worrying questions about the canon as a network, about the presence and role of fragmentation and about an overreliance on authors and authorship.