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.

In Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens uses physiognomy as an indirect way of portraying characters that observe their fellow-characters rather than as a direct means of portraying the characters observed. This reading of faces often constitutes misinterpretation: Dickens links Our Mutual Friend to the issue of reading itself, providing models of reader response. Misreadings thus become morally and aesthetically relevant to the overall structure and effect of the novel.

Flannery O'Connor did not see herself as a political writer, and many critics perpetuate her self-image in their assessment of her work. She was, however, a keen observer of the politics of everyday conversation. By exploring the ritualized exchange of clichés between employer and hired help, particularly in "Revelation" (1964) and "The Displaced Person" (1954), this essay examines the ways in which O'Connor draws attention to the peculiar collective power of the cliché. The two stories demonstrate the politics of the cliché in her fiction, a phenomenon some critics overlook because they assume, as many of O'Connor's characters do, that clichés are empty platitudes. "Revelation" dramatizes the politics of the cliché in a democratic setting, whereas "The Displaced Person" calls attention to the way in which clichés confirm and contest hierarchies of power in the master-servant relationship. In "Revelation," the seemingly benign (and often hilarious) exchange of clichés between two key female characters serves to exclude a third party. The ritualization of their exchange, however, and the assumption that clichés are banal, mask this act of exclusion. "The Displaced Person" also stars two female characters who exchange clichés to exclude an outsider, and because clichés have the ability to echo unexpectedly across conversations, they function both inside and outside the women's relationship. A variety of other speakers draw on a communal stock and recycle the same clichés. The regularities with which clichés and silences circulate in the conversations between the two key characters can thus be extrapolated to a network of other relationships within the story. Over time, a single act of exclusion on the part of two characters develops the potential to trigger escalating acts of aggression, verbal and physical. "The Displaced Person" suggests that clichés carry unexpected and potentially ever graver consequences in a collective context. "Revelation" and "The Displaced Person" enable O'Connor to explore issues of democracy in a new way; read in the context of each other, they highlight the political and ethical significance of clichés, in particular their relation to violence.

You can locate A. R. Ammons in a line of great walkers from Wordsworth to Frank O'Hara, but what makes him different from all the rest is that despite being so peripatetic, he could not keep his feet on the ground. In poem after poem he, or a stand-in protagonist, not only turns, spins, and whirls, but rises, ascends, levitates. Thereafter comes in due course a descent, sometimes an arduous or scarifying one, but which typically finds him the better off after his return to terra firma. Levity in the transferred sense - Ammons was a whimsical, voluble, unbuttoned humorist - proves useful in contending with the perilous consequences of his levitations. In addition to his drollery, Ammons sporadically employs a prophetic voice, meditates on philosophical issues, and delves expertly into phenomena privy to the natural scientist. The composite result is a style of levity entirely his own. The extent to which he may, as a consequence of his levity, or in spite of it, be enrolled in a transcendentalist tradition of the visionary sublime stretching back to Emerson, as Harold Bloom would have it, is debatable. Five poems examined very closely give a slant on the issues involved, "Moment," "Transcendence," "He Held Radical Light," "Levitation," and "Hymn." Other Ammons poems are discussed briefly, and incidental comparisons are made to poems by Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and John Ashbery.

Carlyle's view of modern life as a palimpsest serves as a postulate for his Victorian contemporaries and successors, who make it into the defining idea of the modern city. Following Carlyle's lead, they explore the urban palimpsest, yet nor for them is his prophetic voice of guilt and punishment. Rather, in exploring the uneasy pleasures in the juxtaposition of the urban layers of modern experience, in The Pickwick Papers, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend and other novels Dickens strikes the modern note of the attraction of repulsion as well as shifting, alternating, alternative realities. The boundaries of class and species are honeycombed by pathways which hum with traffic and constant crossings of the layers of the palimpsest of modern urban life, and the reader navigates among unstable places together with the narrators who are often split and divided along the fault lines of urban life.

The essay takes up Garrett Stewart's recent discussion (Partial Answers 8.1) of the ethical tempo of a rhetorical figure, syllepsis, in order to think through some temporal consequences of the ethical turn.

The article focuses on Earth-Bound: Nine Stories of Ireland (1924), a collection of ghost stories composed by Dorothy Macardle, a prolific Irish author, historian, and political journalist. The article demonstrates how Tzvetan Todorov's concept of the reader's hesitation, as central to the fantastic (and by extension the gothic genre), helps one understand Macardle's engagement with the sacrificial ideology of Irish nationalism. Macardle's collection of stories of supernatural apparitions during the troubled 1920s makes Irish history the sphere of the fantastic. It makes the reader hesitate - not between the different approaches to the supernatural - but between the conflicting ideological positions presented in the text.

This essay examines the implications of Dickens's statement in the preface to the one-volume edition of Bleak House (September 1853) that in the novel he "purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things." This claim, I argue, goes to the core of Dickens's art as a writer, an art that combines the presentation of disturbing news about the contemporary state of society with a skilful attempt to provide narrative pleasure, pleasure designed to ensure that the narrator retains his hold over readers for 67 chapters. Dickens's achievement, I conclude, constitutes literary art of the highest order, one that instructs readers in social and ethical truths while also delighting them and holding their attention in the course of telling a compelling story.

The paper demonstrates that Dickens's Our Mutual Friend complicates any attempt to differentiate between aesthetic enjoyment and social awareness in reader response. It isolates three models of reading in which the interconnection between aesthetic effect and consciousness-raising effect is associated with the entanglements between person and thing, animate and inanimate, living and dead, subject and object of perception. These entanglements destabilize the grounds on which we would usually differentiate between aesthetic pleasure and social critique.

The article focuses on the aggressor-victim paradigms upon which Dickens builds three of his female characters in Great Expectations: Mrs. Joe Gargery, Miss Havisham, and Molly. Usually described as monstrous, the three characters are here discussed in terms of the hidden motives of their strange behavior, one of the sources of uneasy pleasures in the reading process. Viewed from the feminist standpoint, the representation of the three characters is associated with Victorian views concerning the treatment of women, sexuality, crime, and marriage; viewed in psychological terms, all the three display symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder, wit the roles of victim and aggressor shifting over time.