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Publications

2021
Benziman, Galia, and Zoe Beenstock. 2021. “Mapping Victorian Empires, Cultures, Identities: Introduction to the Special Issue guest edited by Zoe Beenstock and Galia Benziman”. Partial Answers 19(2): 201-209. . Publisher's VersionAbstract

This special issue of Partial Answers follows in the wake of a four-day conference on mapping and literature – “Mapping Victorian Empires, Cultures, Identities.” In May 2019, over 50 delegates from no fewer than 10 countries gathered in Jerusalem and Haifa to discuss long-19th-century, Victorian, and post-Victorian literary mappings, settings, journeys, and locales. Some of the speakers expanded their talks into the essays presented in this volume. The introduction asks what it is about maps that makes them literary, poetic, and symbolic texts. Maps are notoriously biased because of political and economic agendas and epistemological conventions, and they are inevitably skewed, even if only because they project a global object onto a flat page. Yet poetic maps, unlike scientific ones, acknowledge and savor this slanted gaze.

The introduction analyzes fictional mappings as a poetic device and suggests that in works of literature, maps – commonly taken to provide access to a concrete physical reality– tend to serve as imaginary spaces for rethinking geographies, identities, and cultures. Poetic maps conceptualize geographical reality as an attribute of the mind, giving shape and structure to the interiority and establishing a critical distance from empirical conventions of space.

 

March 2021: Galia Benziman is Associate Professor and Chair of the English department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research focuses on British literature of the long 19th century; in particular, on Dickens, Hardy, the history of childhood, and the Elegy. She has published two books: Narratives of Child Neglect in Romantic and Victorian Culture (2012) and Thomas Hardy's Elegiac Prose and Poetry: Codes of Bereavement (2018). Her essays appeared in Dickens Studies Annual, Dickens Quarterly, Studies in the Novel, SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, JNT, Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens, and other platforms.

 

March 2021: Zoe Beenstock is a lecturer at the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Haifa. She is the author of The Politics of Romanticism: The Social Contract and Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2016). Her new project deals with Romantic Palestine. She has articles published in European Romantic Review, Romanticism, MLQ, SEL 1500-1900, Journal of the History of Ideas, and Philosophy and Literature.

2007
Benziman, Galia . 2007. “Two Patterns of Child Neglect: Blake and Wordsworth”. Partial Answers 5(2): 167-197. . Publisher's Version
Volume 5, issue 2 Topoi
Abstract

Reading some well-known childhood poems by Blake and Wordsworth, the article challenges the accepted opinion that the Puritan and Romantic concepts of the child at the turn of the nineteenth century functioned as opposites. Instead, the article offers a reading that unravels the residues of Puritan and catechetical thinking in texts by two of the earliest advocates of the child’s perspective as a valuable human and poetic quality. Though denouncing authoritarian and catechetical modes of interaction in which the child’s speech is silenced, Blake and Wordsworth, writing at a moment of cultural transition, construct the child in a way that indicates a failure of their own declared purpose of redeeming the child’s perspective and voice as valuably distinct from those of the adult. Although formally and grammatically the voice of Blake’s poetic child is sometimes restored to him, the child is made a spokesman of a sophisticated and emphatically adult discourse of political radicalism. Similarly in Wordsworth, the construction of the child as a necessary layer in the uncovering of the poetic and autobiographical Self denies the child its valuable difference through an adult voice’s ongoing narcissistic ventriloquism. The adult speaker’s idealization of the child’s freedom is ambiguated by the implicit association of freedom with parental neglect, which involves a disregard of the child’s perspective. Thus, in contrast to the declared agenda of the poems, they also imply a desire that the child be less liberated and more regulated by the adult world.

Galia Benziman is Associate Professor of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and specializes in British literature of the long nineteenth century. Her research focuses on the work of Victorian authors, especially Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, on the history of childhood, and on the English elegy. Her first book, Narratives of Child Neglect in Romantic and Victorian Culture, was published in 2012 (Palgrave Macmillan). Her second book, Thomas Hardy’s Elegiac Poetry and Prose: Codes of Bereavement, came out in 2018 (Palgrave Macmillan). Her essays appeared in Partial Answers, Dickens Quarterly, Dickens Studies Annual, Studies in the Novel, SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, and other journals.    

Updated in March 2019

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