This chapter situates George Eliot’s ground-breaking realist novel, Middlemarch, in the context of a longer tradition of provincial fiction. By the time Eliot published Middlemarch, fiction that put small-town life at its centre had developed from the early nineteenth-century ‘sketch’ or ‘tale’ to the chronicle novels of Trollope and Oliphant in the 1850s and 1860s. This chapter argues that Middlemarch is a deliberate provocation regarding the cultural and aesthetic value attributed to the common, the middling, and the local in the 1870s as London exerted ever-clearer centralizing force on culture and education. Middlemarch expands the small forms of provincial fiction through expansive patterning and repetition of everyday plots and locales. This establishes a type of ethical realism in which the fact of frequency does not mean the common is dismissed, but rather is revalued in the narrative as commonality: a ground for collective identity.

Wallace’s public image is of an insular and profoundly American figure, whose work is strongly aligned with US postmodernist heritages and persistently categorized in geographical and national – even regional – terms. Wallace himself invited and directed many such interpretations, referring constantly to his Americanness. However, as numerous scholars have noted over the years, this US-focused lens obscures the many global threads that run through his writing. This chapter explores the European traditions that influenced Wallace, focusing particularly on German and Russian writers and philosophers. Drawing lines between Wallace and Goethe, Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Hesse among others, the chapter explores some of the specific forms of aesthetic inspiration he took from European traditions. Paying close attention to formal techniques within Wallace’s prose allows us to see the particular literary devices he felt free to appropriate within his own context. The political implications of such appropriations are carefully examined, as are questions relating to what Wallace might justifiably have expected his readers to notice or else be unaware of. Building on the work of Jacobs, Boswell and Den Dulk, among others, this chapter argues for the centrality of European literature as a crucial context in which to interpret Wallace’s work and to come to terms with his formidable literary achievements.