It has been said that without George Eliot's last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), "the state of Israel might not exist." In the novel itself, at any rate, the state of Israel only appears as a hazy hypothesis entertained by its narratorial consciousness from within the confines of an implicit European regionalism predicated on English common sense. In Eliot's final fiction, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), the sinister anxieties affecting that common sense in the face of a lurid fantasy of judaeo-techno-capitalist "alienism" of its own making bleed back, generating complications of voice and vision, challenging Eliot's authorship and authority, and straining her text into rhetorical reaction formations indicative of a new crisis in the imagination of human community that all her writing had worked to refine.

The dedicatory poem Aemilia Lanyer wrote for Queen Anne invites the reader to see the verses as a Eucharistic mirror. Despite the volume of critical literature on Salve Deus, Lanyer's uses of sight in the definition of feminine cognition and religious devotion have been ignored. In this article I place Lanyer's use of scopic metaphors within the context of early seventeenth century Protestant idioms of devotion and sight - I thus argue that the aim of Lanyer's work was not only to rewrite Christ's passion or the Original Sin, nor merely to make bid for patronage - it was a femnine re-conception of seeing, reading, and believing which clashed with contemporary ideas of vision and cognition. What Lanyer was doing in her poems was to reconceive both her role as poet and that of the reader's as the two sides of an optic and Eucharistic encounter.

This essay addresses the paradox of Dickens as an urban writer through exploration of his narrative space. On the one hand, like Mayhew, Engels, and other Victorian urban explorers, Dickens is a fierce critic of the social ills of the industrial metropolis. On the other hand, Dickens is ranked alongside Baudelaire and Benjamin as the creator of a new vocabulary for urban pleasures, such as flânerie, consumption, visual distraction, and psychological stimulation. This ambiguity of Dickens' urban attitudes is encapsulated in the doubleness of his urban chronotope. The city of Dickens is often imaged in vertical terms as the dichotomously divided space of the rich and the poor. But equally often, it is structured horizontally as a maze, network, or ring of contagion that unites all the city dwellers in a complex ecology of mutual interdependence. These two axes of representation correspond to the two types of urban involvement, that of the reformer and of the flâneur. In Bleak House they are epitomized by the omniscient narrator's "bird's eye" view of society and Esther's "street level" vision of it. The essay explores the tension and interaction between the detached aesthetics of flânerie and the passionate involvement of social reform in the narrative fabric of Dickens's world. It analyzes the narrative architecture of Bleak House by focusing on the techniques of vision and focalization rather than on the novel's thematic concerns and/or characters' actions.

At the end of A Christmas Carol, the Last of the Spirits points its finger towards "One" gravestone, upon which Ebenezer Scrooge can read his own name. His vexing question is whether he has seen "the shadows of things that Will be" or "the shadows of Things that May be, only"; he takes a solemn oath that he will "sponge away the writing" on the stone. At the end of The Tragedy of King Lear, Lear appears howling, with the dead Cordelia in his arms. He puts a looking-glass to her mouth and declares that, if she lives, "[i]t is a chance which does redeem all sorrows" he has ever felt. At the beginning of his Sickness unto Death, Søren Kierkegaard claims that to be "sick unto death is, not to be able to die - yet not as though there were hope of life"; "when the danger is so great that death has become one's hope, despair is the disconsolateness of not being able to die". This paper examines the question of death via juxtaposing Dickens's and Shakespeare's respective texts in a Kierkegaardian framework. Is it possible to face the death of one's self at all? Or is it only the death of someone whom one loves most which reveals the meaning of death (and life)? Is death a part of life, or does a "living death" permeate our whole life? How can watching people die in a tragedy be elevating? Or is it the muting of death, as in comedy, which liberates us to live?

The article sketches the development of the genre of alternate history, also called allohistory and argues that allohistory may be treated as a philosophical genre that meditates on contingency and determinism. It examines two contemporary allohistorical novels, Israeli author Nava Semel's IsraIsland (2005) and American writer Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007), that comment on the role of Israel in the Jewish imagination. The thematic and formal elements of these texts reveal how a version of allohistory can also function as a kind of detective fiction that may influence the reception of historiographic narratives.

This essay concerns the connection between literature and reality. It argues that the existence of such a connection is made possible by the dual role of social practice in founding, on the one hand, human reality (including character), and on the other, linguistic meaning. While an author is free to determine such matters as plot or imagery under the control of nothing stronger than general plausibility and verisimilitude, a far stronger constraint from the side of reality comes into play the moment he sets about deploying the resources of a natural language, which is not his private property but a public possession, whose possibilities of meaning stand before him independently of his wishes, already richly charged with references, both historic and contemporary, to the structures of practice constitutive of the social order from which it has emerged, and the complexities of whose daily intercourse on all levels it serves to mediate. In developing these themes, the essay explores the relationships between fairy tale, language, and reality in Our Mutual Friend, and the way in which Dickens' language mediates between our "uneasy" sense that, on the one hand, we are reading a fairy tale, or rather a set of interwoven fairy tales, and on the other hand, that the novel is, nevertheless, in some sense a work of "realism," though not at all concerned with "social reality" in any sense seriously analogous to, say, Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor. The title and the epigraph pick up a passage in Cynthia Ozick's early novel Trust: "here was a man who shunned novels on the ground that they were always fiction."

The article considers cases in which the reader's knowledge of historical events enters into his or her reading of works of fiction published before these events took place, and explores the critical, ethical, and theoretical issues that arise in such instances. The topic is investigated with reference to the fiction of Joseph Conrad, and in particular to his works Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Conrad twice went on record in declaring that the writer "writes only half the book; the other half is with the reader," and yet what exactly the reader's "writing" of a fictional work can or ought to consist of is a notoriously vexed topic. How may we distinguish "legitimate" from "illegitimate" readerly "writings"? What ethical objections to the incorporation of knowledge of actual historical events into our reading of fictional texts that predate these events must we take seriously? Should certain topics such as the Holocaust be treated as off-limits in the reader's "writerly" experience of works of fiction? The article builds on a suggestion by the historian David Wootton that the writer creates a space within which readers may think, and asks whether literary critics should be more willing to add "thinking" to activities such as "responding," "interpreting," and "appreciating" when discussing what literary works allow, encourage, and enable readers to do. It concludes that although seeing the world through our reading of fiction, and enriching our reading of fiction with our knowledge of the world, are both activities that involve ethical challenges and responsibilities, they are activities that are a natural part of the common reader's engagement with works of fiction. They should, accordingly, be made open to discussion rather than subject to taboo and denial.

Dickens's depictions of dance are usually read as manifestations of the jovial fun-loving aspect of his fiction. In what is arguably the most famous depiction of dance in the early works, the Fezziwigs' ball in A Christmas Carol, Dickens not only uses the dance to suggest all the positive values associated with good feeling and sociability - the very things missing from Scrooge's life - but also allows his prose to echo the actual rhythm of the dance, so that sound and sense work together to convey the message to both the reader and Scrooge that dancing is a pleasurable, life-affirming, socially positive activity. This paper explores the complex social and literary implications of Dickens's presentation of dance, especially in the fiction that he wrote during the 1840s. While Dickens's juxtaposition of dancing and social misery antedates the 1840s, the paper concentrates on the ways in which Dickens's works of that period, primarily A Christmas Carol and The Battle for Life, depict dance as simultaneously a life-affirming activity and a deflection of the decade's more serious social, medical and economic ills.

This essay examines the pleasure of the text in Dickens's novel Hard Times (1854) and considers the risks it takes in its performance as a novel in a utilitarian economy. Walking a tightrope between employing the genre as an agent of social change and entertaining middle-class readers, Dickens fuses homo ludens with homo faber. The sheer pleasure of reading must be shown to be useful, yet the novel has not proven popular until recent years and its moral message does not wear will in a postmodern hedonistic culture. Nevertheless, imagination as means as well as metaphor must be tested by its success, and the author, like Mr Jupe, cannot afford to miss a trick.

The paper argues that, well aware of the developments in contemporary science, including biology and political economy, Dickens believed in the significance of the scientific paradigm shifts for ordinary human life. Dickens's early fiction constituted, among other things, a passionate critique of para-Malthusian political economy. This critique is resumed in Our Mutual Friend, yet with the new awareness of the shift of dominant paradigms from political economy to Darwinist biological thinking. Whereas the legislature that grew out of political economy could be challenged and modified, Darwin's account of natural selection, a biological theory that had permanent ontological ramifications, had a claim to the stability of a natural law which disabled beliefs in Providential design. Darwin's work, however, did not deny the potential of benevolent sympathetic human agency. Dickens's novel pits such agency against the blind forces of the struggle for survival, even while subverting the confidence in overall ethical design trailed in by the residual elements of the traditional melodrama.

This essay examines Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room in terms of post-impressionist influences of Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell. It demonstrates compositional similarities between Bell's painting Studland Beach and Woolf's novel. Both works use formal design to elicit elegiac emotion in the audience. Jacob's Room is Woolf's first novel that exemplifies her attention to design as a vehicle for emotion, the idea to which she had been exposed by Vanessa Bell's and other Post-Impressionist paintings since 1910.

In their contributions to the forum on "The Ethics of Temporality" (Partial Answers 8.1, 2009) Elana Gomel and Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan suggest that there can be no genuine ethical position without the rejection of deterministic models of thought. Such a rejection, they claim, is predicated upon a correct understanding of time as a real force for difference and heterogeneity - a force that remains irreducible to any totalizing discourse or meta-historical perspective. Taking its cue from that discussion, "Ethics of the Event" explores the paradoxes (ethical as well as epistemological) engendered by the modernist insight that time is real. In particular, the essay analyzes the strain that such an insight places upon the modern ideal of subjective self-determination. It then draws upon the work of Samuel Beckett to flesh out a literary model that is able to find some species of ethical freedom outside the framework of a fully self-determined subjectivity.

In the sesquicentennials of Darwin's The Origin of Species and Mill's On Liberty, determinism and freedom returned to grand and popular narrative. NeoDarwinian books like The Literary Animal (2005) and Madame Bovary's Ovaries (2005) returned us via evolutionary psychology or E. O. Wilson's socio-biology to a universal human nature based in genes and reproduction. Whereas Habermasians grounded freedom and constraint solely in community and communication, NeoDarwinians reduced human decisions to reproductive instincts. Then 2010 saw the tenth anniversary of the completed human genome sequence, and reductive conceptions of the genome were rife. Confronted with such reductionisms, we are challenged to maintain a more complex understanding of the interworkings of nature and culture in species self-formation. This essay does so by reconsidering the methods of the philosophical anthropologists who valued the human capacities for freedom and choice, self-creation, and self-formation, within natural limits and constraints. In the complex workings of nature and culture, humans cannot be reduced to genes or reproductive strategies, nor can they be reduced to mere cultural constructs. The philosophical anthropologists studied the way culture and technology mediated biological nature, and vice versa, the way nature mediated culture and technology. When they wanted to know what humankind was, they looked at the history of its interactions with nature. Through that history, they saw its capabilities and limits. There was no essence of humankind outside its historical existence, and the ability to reflect on that history opened the world to ideal goals. This empirical or historical ontology that asked what kinds of creatures humans were at home in both nature and their diverse cultures was at its height in the mid-nineteenth century and is only now returning after a century and a half of reductions to either nature or culture. From geneticists to meteorologists, scientists are looking at the ways in which culture interacts with the environment at both molecular and global levels. They write of onto-genetic or developmental niches in which nature is nurtured as the product of mutually influencing genes and environment. The terms they use are Emergence, post-genomics, and the new epigenesis. My contention is that cutting-edge science today is much closer to the pre-disciplinary sciences of the mid-nineteenth century than we have seen for 150 years and that when reading the Victorians we should celebrate their epistemic pluralism and diversity. We should celebrate the uneasy pleasures of knowing that we are both nature and culture, free, but only within limits. Dickens was characteristically knowledgeable of the science of his time, and his work shows the scope and limits of the human animal as conceived in the 1850s. I use Little Dorrit to demonstrate this because it is a novel about limits and constraints. I present my argument in the form of four theses on Nature, culture, technology, and hope, and I claim that these not only reflect the science of Dickens's time but also of our own.

A survey of the models constructed in the articles of this special issue to explain the compatibility of, on the one hand, the entertainment value and the aesthetic pleasure yielded by Dickens's works and, on the other hand, their consciousness-raising social agenda.

I first discussed the significance of Jules de Gaultier's philosophy in Jack London's work in my article "Jack London's Medusa of Truth," published by Philosophy and Literature in 2002 (26.1). This article offers a more systematic approach to the kind of dialectical philosophy that Gaultier and London shared, and which accounts for London's eureka response when Benjamin De Casseres first introduced him to the French philosopher's conception of reality (le réel) as "a fact of opposition between two states of one and the same force," in a form of conflict between powers of impulsion/flux and arrest. Throughout his writing career, London had been articulating and negotiating the same kind of dialectical conflict, notably the tension between his radical nihilism, the "white logic" of naturalism, and his existential need for some vitalistic impulsion, a "Maya-Lie," what Gaultier would term bovarysme and define as "the power given man to see himself other than what he is" ("le pouvoir départi à l'homme de se concevoir autre qu'il n'est"). Saddled with Nietzsche's intellectual conscience, London would have to cope dialectically with the inherent contradictions and partial answers of his existential position, in terms of which any synthesis of transcendence must necessarily be precarious and intermittent.

January 2011: Born in 1941, Per Serritslev Petersen graduated from Aarhus University, Denmark, in 1969, with English as major, Latin as minor subject. Assistant Professor in the English Department of Aarhus University 1971--1974, Associate Professor 1974--2005. Chairman of the English Board of Studies 1974--1976, Chairman of the English Department 1979--1984 and 1986--1992, Guest Professor at Centenary College of Louisiana, Shreveport, 1984 and 2008. He has published widely within British and American studies, literary and cultural theory as well as individual authors, notably Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Tennyson, D.H. Lawrence, Tom Stoppard, Melville, Emily Dickinson, Jack London, Don DeLillo, Bret Easton Ellis. His most recent publication is an essay in reception history, namely “Receptions of Ovid’s Salmacis-and-Hermaphroditus Metamorphosis from Arthur Golding to Ted Hughes” (2009).

The article argues that Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby contains a number of elements taken from Frances Trollope's anti-slavery novel Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw; or Life of the Mississippi. In detaching Trollope's images and language from the setting of plantation culture, Dickens creates a story that is permeated with the feelings of abolitionist literature without being tied to a single political aim.