This paper shows that Frances Burney used language and interaction features in the dialogue of her novels to indicate the moral worth of some of her characters. It also shows how Burney’s linking of language and morality allowed her to contribute to stimulating contemporary debates in which three major discourses of the enlightenment intersected: philosophical debates relating to the nature of goodness; consideration of the functions of language, in particular its potential to represent or govern morality; and discussions of the efficacy of spoken language in conversational contexts. 

In Frances Burney’s novels the criteria by which people should be judged are not so much social as moral, and her heroines are located in ethical spaces where predatory opportunists, pretentious egoists, and violent oppressors are to be recognized and spurned.  But recognition is not always easy, and sometimes polish and rank can mask unsavoury motives. Conduct books rarely tackled the complex issue of detecting pretence; nor did they offer a nuanced understanding of more complicated and therefore more demanding social contexts. Burney’s novels address such omissions, providing narrational schemata for working through diverse situations and relationships, through the various difficulties which the heroines encounter in their educative process. For Burney, speech is the index of morality, offering a reliable code to read an individual’s qualities and principles, beyond background, education, and gender. Making flexible use of modern linguistics, this paper shows how Burney encodes interiority in dialogue to signify moral marginality.

Through readings of contemporary medical accounts of shell shock alongside Dorothy L. Sayers’ (1893--1957) popular detective novels, this essay argues that through the character of Peter Wimsey, a veteran of the World War I and a survivor of shell shock, Sayers not only participates in the creation of a new kind of male literary protagonist, distinguished by his vulnerability rather than virility, but also intervenes in a contemporary debate about the place of a shell-shocked soldier in post-war society. While the medical literature aligned the doctor, detective, and policeman against the soldier, shell shock victim, and criminal, Sayers exposes and revises the implied alignment of shell shock and criminality, using shell shock as the pre-condition for the creation of an empathic, flawed, and profoundly modern detective in a traumatized and diminished post-war England.

The paper charts the philosophical fate of a syntactic trope:  from the allusion to Dickens’s early deployment of syllepsis in Pickwick Papers as a “category-mistake” (going home “in a flood of tears and a sedan chair”), leading example in Gilbert Ryle’s attack on Descartes’s mind/body dualism, down through the resistance to an either/or deadlock in the philosophically inflected poetics of such different writers as Allen Grossman and Giorgio Agamben.  Revealing the cognitive equivocations of this mostly (but not exclusively) comic grammar in Dickens, examples from his late work (in comparison to the trope’s narrative deployment from Edgeworth through Eliot to Hardy and James) summon not just a logical tension but a tacit ethics of attention, one open to revisionary impulses operating against the tread of syntactic regimentation.  Among other results, relations of body to mind often take the form of a phrase’s splay between a literal and a figurative sense -- a supposed dichotomy that the jolt of syllepsis calls one to rethink.

One of the most powerful and influential narratives in Western culture is the apocalyptic plot, derived from Christian eschatology, which describes the transition from a polluted, fallen world to a pure, crystalline millennium. This transition involves a protracted period of suffering and catastrophes known as the Tribulations.
            The apocalyptic plot expresses a linear, teleological concept of temporality, in which chronology supersedes duration. It constitutes a common feature of many ostensibly disparate political and cultural phenomena: from Christian fundamentalism to radical Islam; from disaster movies to ecological nightmares.
            This paper analyzes the apocalyptic interplay of narrative chronology and duration by discussing J. G. Ballard's Four Elements Quartet -- The Wind from Nowhere (1961), The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1964), and The Crystal World (1966). Each novel presents a version of the apocalypse linked to one of the four traditional elements: air, water, fire, and earth. But their real focus is not on apocalyptic chronology but on catastrophic duration. They illuminate the postmodern fascination with the apocalypse as an aesthetic experience, while questioning its ideological premises.
            Ballard's novels expose the apocalyptic desire that animates so much of postmodern experience of time and history. Ballard's catastrophic duration challenges the ideological constructions of the apocalyptic plot, whether in religious millenarianism or in secular utopianism, and opposes them with a focus on corporeal experience and psychic endurance. Both thematically and structurally, the Four Elements Quartet resonates with Albert Camus' anti-millenarian statement: "Don't wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day."

Following a lead from Raymond Williams, who talks about how the notion of the generation in its modern sense developed in the late eighteenth century, this paper develops both a conjecture about the social situation in which the notion of the generation became more prominent and a reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein which argues that the novel bears the strong impress of the notion of bonds created between age-mates. While the notion of generation has long been recognized in relation to individual lives and has figured prominently in genealogical accounts of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the paper track the way the notion developed expansiveness and publicness — so that persons increasingly came to think of themselves as bound together not because they were members of the same family but rather because they were members of the same generation. The essay examines some of the social structures that contributed to this development and one of its consequences -- namely, a sense of solidarity among persons of the same age who might be otherwise strangers to one another -- useful for thinking about the exclusion of Frankenstein’s Creature.

The special issue of Partial Answers devoted to British women writers is organized around the theme of marginalia, a concept that shifts attention away from the commonplace critical understanding of “margin” as merely an indicator of status and toward the intellectual work that occurs within it. The relation of “margin” to “center” articulates the position that women authors have historically occupied vis-à-vis a male tradition of literary creation; however, the margin is also a space of possibility that invites women authors to enter into an intellectual exchange with this tradition and to generate their own responses to it. The introduction surveys the essays collected in the issue as reflecting in different ways on the complex literary and discursive effects of women’s liminal locations.

Like most of his work, Herman Melville’s notoriously unpopular 1866 volume of Civil War poetry Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War has traditionally been read strictly under the rubric of Modernism. Within this framework, scholars generally conclude that this disjunctive volume of poetry is wholly inferior to Melville’s prose.  In this essay, I depart from the conventional reading of Melville, redefining him as a poet necessarily embedded in the nineteenth-century tradition of sentimentalism. I suggest that the unpopularity of Battle-Pieces, both in 1866 and today, stems from the invitation Melville extends to readers to enter a sentimental text even as he revises the very notion of sentimentality. By considering Battle-Pieces, a highly visual text, in the context of the artistic expectations accompanying a sentimental tradition with roots in Fireside poetry, I suggest that in his poetry Melville does not abandon the familial mode on which sentimentality is based. Rather, in mapping out an intertextual landscape in Battle-Pieces, Melville calls attention to the postbellum failure of the sentimental universality that was once a foundational principle of a coherent and communal national identity. As a poet responding to the sentimental expectations of his readers, Melville interrogates both a crisis in national unity and a crisis in the notion of national universality that underpins sentimental art.

This essay explores one version of a recurring pattern in the Victorian novel, the tendency to compare English and French models of national character. While many novelists, including Charlotte Brontë, portray French women as possessing an immoral theatricality, and deploying deceptive “public” personae that contrast with the Englishwoman’s devotion to her national and domestic homes, Brontë’s Villette endows French theater with the power to question British national gender ideals.