INTRODUCTION

This chapter examines the fiction and social criticism of Matthew Arnold, Anthony Trollope and George Eliot, all of whom can be described variously as nineteenth-century ‘liberal’ authors. Beginning with Arnold's influential use of the binary opposition ‘Hebraism and Hellenism’ in his Culture and Anarchy, we will note the extent that a racial vocabulary underpins these culturally differentiating terms. Within the contradictory discourses of ‘race’ and ‘culture’, ‘the Jew’ will be seen to be constructed as both an object that can be spectacularly civilized (embodying Arnold's ideal of ‘culture’) and, at the same time, as an unchanging semitic ‘other’. This ambivalence will be seen to be a product of the competing needs of the liberal nation-state which situates ‘the Jew’ in both a particularist ‘English’ community and an assimilating, universalist framework.