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-19^th-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 19^th 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.

This paper begins by assessing the work of Franco Moretti and his Stanford colleagues in using quantitative formalism for mapping nineteenth-century European fiction. My objection to applying this technology to the writings of Charles Dickens is that quantitative formalism and distant reading conspire with Benthamite calculations to erase the specific in favor of norms established by grossing up thousands of data points. Dickens’s artistic belief in the importance of representing the individual and assessing its relationship to the mass overrides the strategies Moretti practices. Nonetheless, a number of issues raised by him may be amenable to a modified practice of distant reading. In the second half of the paper I propose that if such technology is applied to a single author, Dickens, and is careful to distinguish the times of composition, publication, and reissue of texts, a multi-dimensional interactive map of London, registering the geographic, administrative, and structural times, places, history, and references within his writing, could document both his journalistic realism and his imagination in new ways, and thus better evaluate his contribution to the century’s aesthetic and conceptual achievements.

March 2021: Robert L. Patten, now a retired professor of English at Rice University, is currently a non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies in the School of Advanced Study, University of London. He has published widely on nineteenth-century British and European art, literature, and book history. His two-volume biography of the British graphic artist George Cruikshank was named Outstanding Book in Art History by Choice and the best biography of the 1990s by the London Guardian newspaper. Charles Dickens and “Boz”: The Birth of the Industrial-Age Author received the Colby Award from the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals and was short-listed for the Christian Gauss Award from Phi Beta Kappa. An early study of Charles Dickens and His Publishers, issued in 1978 by the Clarendon Press, went into a paperback edition and then a revised second edition in 2017 from Oxford UP. Publisher and editor of SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 for thirty years, Patten was named Outstanding Literary Editor for 2012 by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

The article focuses on the presence of China — its citizens, its culture — on the map of London during the Victorian age, and on the role Dickens played in locating and describing such space in the eastern part of the great metropolis and hub of the Empire. There is a mirroring between London and Canton, a curious coincidence of toponyms, suggestive of an ambiguous cultural interface.

This ambivalence is associated with the victorious wars waged by England against China in order to retain the monopoly on opium trade. The intercourse between the two nations is moulded by Dickens and his contemporary journalists in ways that suggest hegemony, conflict, otherness, and the perils of miscegenation. The small Chinese community of Limehouse becomes part and target of sensational journalism and urban tourism, producing descriptions that include shades of grotesque steeped in exoticism. Opium dens are the targets of such descriptions — fear and fascination colour the spaces represented in a way that increases indeterminacy.

The article dwells on the map of China, as in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy set against the China–Bengal relationship (Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, Flood of Fire), as well as on the map of London, especially the Limehouse area, close to the West India and East India docks. This part of London would acquire specific coloration during the Victorian age, owing, among others, to Dickens’s role in describing its cultural geography.

March 2021: Francesca Orestano, Professor of English Literature at Milan University, wrote on the American Renaissance (Dal Neoclassico al Classico); on Revd. William Gilpin and the picturesque (Paesaggio e finzione); and on visual studies (La parola e lo sguardo). She has edited books and journal issues on children’s literature, Alexander Pope, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Jakob Burckhardt, John Ruskin, chemistry and taste, Virginia Woolf, Tomasi di Lampedusa. Her essay on Little Dorrit is in The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens. She works on gardens and gardening; in 2020 she has edited the issue of Questione Romantica devoted to “Romanticism and Cultural Memory.” http://unimi.academia.edu/FrancescaOrestano

This essay investigates several instances of travel writing in the Dickens weekly magazines, Household Words (1850–1859) and All the Year Round (1859–1895), that make use of the common Victorian phrase “At Home” in their titles, particularly “At Home at Tehran” (1862), “At Home in Siam” (1857), “Mrs. Mohammed Bey ‘at Home’” (1862), and “The Japanese at Home” (1862). Some of these articles illustrate the British making themselves “at home” in the world, while others purport to provide an exotic glimpse into the domestic lives of others abroad. The variety of these articles’ topics and settings offer to map the imperial world for the armchair reader “at home” in Britain, yet the articles themselves are limited by Dickens’s editorial preferences for collective authorship and a humorous tone, which flatten the very cultural distinctions that the travel writing genre promises to illuminate. It is argued that the periodicals’ emphasis on Dickensian humor often results in the ridicule of other countries’ domestic behavior, thereby contributing to the popular Victorian perception of British domesticity as superior to that of the rest of the world.

March 2021: Dr. Jessica Durgan is an Associate Professor of English at Bemidji State University in Minnesota, USA. She is the author of Art, Race, and Fantastic Color Change in the Victorian Novel (Routledge 2018), and has published essays in journals and book collections such as Victorian Literature and Culture, The Victorian Era in Twenty-First Century Children’s and Adolescent Literature and Culture, and Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory in a Global Context: From Consumerism to Celebrity Culture.

Mary Seacole’s memoir Wonderful Adventures is recognized for its negotiation of various genres of Victorian writing, including autobiography, travel writing, the slave narrative, and a burgeoning Caribbean tradition of letters. It is a text which is usually interpreted through conventions of Empire, or through the lens of Postcolonial studies. Attempting to bridge this either/or approach, this article focuses on Seacole’s construction of narrative commonalities: I ask, why would a woman so clearly bent on defying the limitations placed on her by gender and race, and whose achievements appear so exceptionally individual, undergird her narrative with constant references to collective identities — often in their most stereotypical abstractions? To answer this question, I engage in close readings that explore the tension between the typical and the specific though Seacole’s use of terminology, focalization and passive voice, and the repeated use of antiphonal structures such as an AAB pattern. I show how Seacole’s self-representation, and her reference to black communities and individuals, draw on trickster sensibilities, thus expanding previous readings of her text that consider her either subversive or complicit in the imperial project. I suggest that Seacole injects Jamaican and black Atlantic sensibilities into her text, even as she uses Victorian rhetorical devices, making the two traditions complementary — as they seem to be in her life.

March 2021: Ruth S. Wenske is a postdoctoral researcher at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where she also serves as head the Africa Unit at the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace. Her main research area is contemporary Anglophone African realism with a focus on self-writing, having published articles on the novels of Chimamanda Adichie, Chinua Achebe, and Binyavanga Wainaina. Her secondary research focus is on the connection between literature and literacy in questions of language and pedagogy, including a joint research project with Makerere University on the implementation of the Mother Tongue reform in Ugandan primary schools. She has taught courses on African literature and culture at the Program of Cultural Studies at the Hebrew University, and at the University of Haifa, where she completed her PhD at the English Department. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2246-6867

This article traces the place of the Book of Esther in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and argues that the biblical work can be seen as Eliot’s primary “map” in her own project of literal and metaphorical remapping. Historical and cultural contexts, as well as close readings of the texts, suggest that the Book of Esther is especially relevant because it engages with the “Jewish Question” and the “Woman Question” in tandem; it offers a terrain for the novel’s ideas on both issues, while precipitating a revised hermeneutic of the biblical text. Remapping the Book of Esther serves Eliot in advocating for a Jewish return and to the Land of Israel and in spurring discourse towards the depolarization of gendered traits, roles, and relations. However, while Eliot answers the Jewish Question with proto-Zionism, she leaves the Woman Question chillingly unanswered — as does the Book of Esther itself.

March 2021: Channah Damatov is a PhD candidate and Kaete Klausner Fellow in the Department of General and Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her dissertation explores the Book of Esther in Victorian Literature, with a focus on its reception in three novels, Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell, Villette by Charlotte Brontë, and Daniel Deronda by George Eliot. Her wider research interests include the Bible as literature, immigrant literature (especially as regards homeland and exile, displacement, assimilation, and cultural identity), and gender in literature. Channah lives in Giv’at Shmuel, Israel, with her husband, daughter, and two dogs.

This article argues that Oscar Wilde’s work employs location to blur the Victorian sense of morality. After surveying Victorian mapping practices as they relate to Wilde and ideas of moral topography, and defining Wilde’s interest in and flaunting of realism, the article shows how Wilde’s more specifically placed texts blur moral boundaries, while morally explicit texts provide only a vague sense of place.

March 2021: Kees de Vries is lecturer in English Language and Culture at the Department of English Language and Culture at the faculty of Arts, University of Groningen, where he specializes in Oscar Wilde and (neo-)Victorian literature, as well as the intersection between music and literature.

In Heshel’s Kingdom, Dan Jacobson explores the impact of the British Empire’s expansion on Lithuanian Jewry. His memoir constructs a “mattering map” of the experience of his family, after the death of his grandfather, Heshel. Like more than thirty thousand other Jews, the bereaved family moved to a welcoming South Africa.

            Heshel’s Kingdom is a split/screen account, alternating between Kimberley, South Africa, and Varniai, Lithuania. Their juxtaposition leads Dan Jacobson to chart the experiences of two Jewish communities, and construct a narrative map of familial and communal life. This split/screen account is not symmetrical. For the South Africa narrative, the narrator relies on familial and personal history. But for Lithuania he must tease out information from absence, seeking bits and remnants of the murdered Lithuanian Jewish community in order to find a purchase on which to reconstruct life in his grandfather’s Varniai, a small, Nazi-destroyed Lithuanian town.

            The narrator interrogates the images of the two communities: Jacobson addresses the jacket-cover photograph of grandfather Heshel as if it might speak to him, and thus help him discover details of the life of his Lithuanian grandfather, whom he never knew. Asking questions, Jacobson invites the reader to engage with him as if they were looking together at a family-album: familial-networks begin to emerge, and kinship relationships elaborate the family’s life in South Africa; once activated the narrator can tease it into continuing the search for family experience. But the questions about Lithuania do not elicit much in the way of answers, for that Jewish community was destroyed by the Nazis and their Lithuanian helpers. Following the narrator’s lead, the reader’s imagination works to construct a comparative account both of the Jewish immigration to South Africa and the Jewish catastrophe in Lithuania, defining a “mattering map” of modern Jewish experience.

Murray Baumgarten is Research Professor of Literature and Distinguished Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Founding Director of the Dickens Project of the University of California, and Emeritus Editor of Judaism. He is the author of Carlyle and His Era (1975), Carlyle: Books & Margins (1980), City Scriptures: Modern Jewish Writing (1982), and numerous articles on nineteenth-century English literature as well as on American-Jewish writers. With Barbara Gottfried he has co-authored Understanding Philip Roth (1990). He has served as Editor in Chief of the California Strouse Carlyle Edition and has co-edited Homes and Homelessness in the Victorian Imagination (1999, with H. M. Daleski) and Jewish Culture and the Hispanic World:  Essays in Memory of Joseph H. Silverman (2001, with Samuel G. Armistead, Mishael M. Caspi, and Juan de la Cuesta). He is a Founding Board Member of the Venice Center for International Jewish Studies.

(Updated on March 20, 2016)

According to Vladimir Nabokov, exactness of detail in the composition and the reading of literary texts can yield “the sensual spark without which the book is dead”: one needs, for instance, to understand the topography of Mansfield Park in order to respond to Austen’s “stereographic charm.” Speaking after Stuart Gilbert’s chart of the episodes of Joyce’s Ulysses but before Gifford and Seidman’s maps in Ulysses Annotated, Nabokov protested against “the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings” and advised careful readers to “prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” Nabokov himself draws maps in his (posthumously published) lecture notes of the 1950s. This paper comments on the “stereographic” implications of his maps and then turns to Nabokov’s biography of Pushkin’s African great grandfather. Studying the possible origins of Abram Gannibal, Nabokov reads maps of Ethiopia. Though his essay is largely a matter of the critique of sources, the course of Ethiopian river-beds seems to give him “the sensual spark” which, despite his vexed insistence on the literal in Ulysses, follows Joyce’s novel in understated transmutation of stereographic detail into symbolism. 

March 2021: Leona Toker (English Department, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) is the author of Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (1989), Eloquent Reticence: Withholding Information in Fictional Narrative (1993), Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (2000), Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission (2010), and Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontextual Reading (2019). She has put together the collection Commitment in Reflection: Essays in Literature and Moral Philosophy (1994) and has co-edited Rereading Texts / Rethinking Critical Presuppositions: Essays in Honour of H.M. Daleski (1996) and Knowledge and Pain (2012). She is Editor of Partial Answers.

This essay argues that the temporal adverb “meanwhile” marks a series of key moments in Paradise Lost, in which an endless succession is built into the present moment. Hitherto overlooked by the critics, this duration is represented in the poem as a concrete, coherent, and intelligible form, which opens the possibility of transformation implicit in the monistic scale of “one first matter all.” Milton models this structure on Aristotle’s theory of the infinite presented in Physics III, yet he goes beyond Aristotle in representing the infinite as the distinctive feature of moral life. In the poem’s representation of hell or the postlapsarian condition, “meanwhile” serves as a mere indexical adverb, the function of which is to designate temporal or spatial shifts. The possibility of transformation, which “meanwhile” opens in the present moment, is reserved in Milton’s poem to the prelapsarian or repentant mind.

October 2020: Ayelet Langer is an assistant professor in the Department of English Literature at the University of Haifa. Her research interests are Early Modern literature with an emphasis on John Milton’s poetry and its intellectual sources and engagements. Langer published articles in Milton Studies, EMLS, Notes & Queries, and in Irrtum – Error – Erreur (Miscellanea Mediaevalia Band 40), ed. Andreas Speer and Maxime Mauriège; her new work is forthcoming in UTQ, Modern Philology, and Philosophy and Literature. Her current project is a book on Milton and time.

This paper is concerned with the intersection between ideological influence, epistemology, and Orientalism.  In 1913, an American named William Francis Mannix claimed to have edited a memoir based on the diary of the famous Chinese statesman, Li Hongzhang. The Memoirs of Li Hung Chang was a success in America and Britain, with expert sinologists praising its contributions.  When the memoir was exposed as a forgery, some readers struggled to explain its success by the perceived verisimilitude of the work.  By taking a closer look at Mannix’s book, this paper considers the concept of truth, knowledge construction and dissemination, as well as the role of cultural and ideological presuppositions that shape our understandings. 

October 2020: Amy Matthewson is Senior Teaching Fellow and Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.  Her research explores race relations through visual and material culture, specifically China’s relationship with the global community in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  She has a special interest in British and Chinese contact as well as the processes of ideology and epistemology. She can be followed on Twitter @Visual_Cultures or on her webpage (amymatthewson.com).

The play Elijah (1963), written by the philosopher Martin Buber in his twilight days, represents his diagnosis of the state of humanity at his time. I discuss this play as an allegorical drama, examining it against the background of Buber’s rejection of allegory, and demonstrating its implementation of the specific sense Buber gave to the allegoric in "Symbolic and Sacramental Existence in Judaism" (1934). Dramatic, allegorical multilayered agon enables Buber to express the idea of crisis and struggle between the principles of form and formlessness and between decisiveness and hesitation as enabling decision, that is, creation; it enables a simultaneous exploration of the political and the existential, the individual and the collective, as well as the validation of the affinity that Buber identifies between the individual inner struggle and the struggle embodied in history. In the frame of a Biblical play, Buber thus expressed his thoughts about Jewish society in the nascent State of Israel and about post-war Germany, his interpretation of the Cold War. The play renders his philosophical and theological concerns and his interpretation of history, including his own role in it.

October 2020: Einat Davidi, author of Paradiso as Pardes: A Contrapuntal Reading of José Lezama Limas’ Poetology and the Cabalistic Theory of Language and History (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2012) and of several articles on Cuban Literature (José Lezama Lima, Guillermo Rosales) and Spanish Baroque literature (Calderón de la Barca, Antonio Enríquez Gómez) is faculty member at the department of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of Haifa. 

Nigerian playwright and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka once described The Swamp Dwellers as an exploration of economic displacement and cultural disruption resulting from the pillage of natural resources by colonial governments and international corporations. Soyinka set his play deep in the Niger Delta, a place of dense mangrove swamps and the folkloric Mami Wata—a half-human, half-fish seductress, to highlight the environmental degradation and lost livelihoods of the Yoruba, Ogoni, and other indigenous peoples. By focusing on a handful of characters who inhabit or pass through a small hut built by Makuri and Alu, an impoverished elderly couple eking out an existence in the heart of the swamp, Soyinka reveals how migration and acculturation erode traditional values and reshape identity in ways that encourage avarice and self-interest over family and community, promote political and economic corruption, and accelerate the replacement of indigenous belief systems with the depersonalized transactional values of commerce and trade.

October 2020: Mark S. Ferrara is associate professor of English at State University of New York College at Oneonta and author of several books including Palace of Ashes (2015), Sacred Bliss (2016), and American Community (2020).

This paper explores Varlam Shalamov’s representation of the fate of the Russian intelligentsia in the Gulag, his framing and reframing his idea of the writer’s duty. In Kolyma Tales, Shalamov not only bears witness to the Russian intelligentsia in the camps, but also establishes a dynamic relationship of common identity between the author and those about whom he writes. This relationship restores the erased identities of intelligenty and sheds light on Shalamov’s understanding of the writer’s duty to give voice to their otherwise lost experiences. Instead of declaring the Gulag the site of the death of the Russian intelligentsia in the 20th century, the Soviet camp experience becomes for Shalamov an opportunity to bring nuance to the multidimensional heritage of the intelligentsia and to affirm his belief in the immortality of the intelligentsia as an idea.

October 2020: Josefina Lundblad-Janjić is assistant professor of Russian in Monterey, California, and has worked as a lecturer at University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her doctorate in Slavic Languages & Literatures from University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on narratives of imprisonment and exile in the Russian literary tradition in general and on the prose and dramaturgy of Varlam Shalamov in particular.

Typical of Ian McEwan’s early “shock literature,” “Solid Geometry” has attracted much scholarly comment on the issue of the conflict between female emotionalism and male rationality. By contrast, this paper focuses on the mystery of character M’s disappearance and examines the story’s three impossible events in the conceptual system of unnatural narratology. Yet it goes beyond the current model of naturalizing readings vs. unnaturalizing readings: it shows how the methods of ethical literary criticism can combine with unnatural narratology to yield new insights into the story, especially with the help of the concepts of ethical identity and ethical choice.

October 2020: Biwu Shang is Professor of English at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He is the author of In Pursuit of Narrative Dynamics (Peter Lang, 2011), Contemporary Western Narratology: Postclassical Perspectives (People’s Literature Press, 2013) and Unnatural Narrative across Borders: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives (Routledge, 2019). His work has appeared in Comparative Literature Studies, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Journal of Literary Semantics, Neohelicon, Semiotica and Arcadia, among other journals.