This essay argues that Victor Hugo's novel Notre Dame de Paris rescues Gothic buildings that still existed in France from destruction by transforming them into national symbols. Through his novel, he transforms the people who were their greatest threat - from a restive mob into a nation - by inserting them and their ancestors into the narrative of French history. Hugo saw destruction of castles and churches in France in the wake of the Revolution and became convinced that these first and easiest targets of political unrest were also irreplaceable witnesses to important events right up to his own uneasy present. Their disappearance meant the loss of part of the historical record, gaps in collective memory, and the loss of a corresponding part of the national identity. The 1830s, when Notre Dame de Paris was published, political debate turned to how to end the cycle of revolution and restoration in which the French seemed locked. What sort of government was France to have? How was French society to be organised? By whom were such decisions to be made? Hugo's novel answers these questions by turning the attention of a wide readership to a distant, non-controversial past in order to construct an image of France and its people that everyone could endorse, one that combines the best qualities of all people, regardless of faction or ideology. United and possessing political will and real power to effect change, they are the French nation centuries before the idea of nation. The writing and publication of this novel, then, is an act of architectural restoration, recovery of a lost world, and creation of national myth rooted in the "Gothic" past-a literary restoration of the buildings of the ancien régime, even as his it underscores the impossibility and undesirability of the restoration of Bourbon absolutism. Hugo showed post-Revolutionary France how to make sense of their recent past as periodically recurring upheaval in modern guise, not as catastrophe to be explained away or denied. The publication of his novel marks a novelist's insertion of himself into what his contemporaries often saw as an essentially political debate. Hugo presents French identity as a collective project driven by people's intellectual engagement with their culture and with a past they have never really considered their own. By including a mass readership in the process of defining French identity, Hugo's novel could extend Revolution into the realm of civil discourse - and, perhaps, remove it from the streets.

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.