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.

The essay discusses the way in which the eighteenth-century writer Anna Seward created an interface between literature and science by challenging the theories of a renowned astronomer through her poetry. No matter what their level of interest, women in the eighteenth century had little recourse to an education in science. Seward’s education was literary, and she paid little attention to the sciences until she attended a lecture in Lichfield given by the astronomer, Robert Evans Lloyd. He illustrated his talk with an orrery. Joseph Wright’s painting, The Philosopher giving that lecture on the Orrery, in which a lamp is put in place of the Sun (1766), demonstrates the prevalent fascination with astronomy. After the lecture, Seward wrote a poem on the same subject, “The Terrestrial Year, passing through the signs of the Zodiac,” but not before she had interrogated Lloyd on his presentation of the juxtaposition of Earth and the constellations, publicly questioning his theories. Although her knowledge of astronomy was founded on references to the zodiac in the poems of Milton and Thomson, she engaged with further scientific research and was able to prove that Lloyd’s system was flawed. Her findings inspired her to write her poem which, despite its origins, has more reference to classical literature than to science. An interesting part of the poem, however, is the introductory ‘Proem’ which gives the scientific rationale for the work, tracing Seward’s challenge and her educational progress. Her proem leads us into the poem and leaves us in no doubt that Seward’s exploration of the complexities of the solar system finds new poetic ground through her quest for scientific knowledge.

Is there a compelling normative case for value pluralism? Would we be better off in a world of irreducibly diverse and sometimes tragically conflicting values rather than one in which our values fit harmoniously together? This article identifies, examines and evaluates a normative argument for value pluralism suggested in Isaiah Berlin’s sessays on the history of ideas and particularly on Russian writers – that is, that deep conflicts of identity bound up with conflicting values sometimes contribute critically to the creation of great works of art, philosophy, and politics. Berlin attributes such deep identity conflicts to a range of important European historical figures, from Marx and Disraeli to Tolstoy and Turgenev to Hamann and Mill, and argues that their works of creative genius were motivated in part by the need to transcend their internal conflicts. On his interpretation, value conflicts appear to have been a necessary condition for their great works. In so far as we value these great creative works, it would then appear that we have a reason for embracing the underlying plurality of values that made them possible. But Berlin never linked these insights to his case for value pluralism or political liberalism. This article ends by evaluating those potential linkages.  It concludes that there is a good reason that Berlin did not explicitly build a normative argument for value pluralism on these great works: on careful examination the argument reveals a paradoxical quality that at least partially undermines his critique of monism. By consequence, the argument from great works does not lend support to Berlin’s famous defense of pluralist liberalism, but rather to a form of creative liberalism that does not need to choose between pluralist sensibilities and monist aspirations.

In these pages I present my interpretation of Iser’s model of emergence. I emphasize that what I am presenting is my understanding and exemplification of the relations among the chief terms in Iser’s model, namely, recursion, negativity, and emergence. At the same time, what I offer is, I believe, an extrapolation from what we know of Iser’s terms. I propose that the recursive relations and emergences traced by Iser in effect constitute an interactive experience of that which he called the “imaginary.” This recursive experience is a way of collectively taking part in the emergence of imagined being. This is to suggest that in his theoretical work Iser was moving from a theory of the individual act of reading to a theory of cultural and artistic transformation that is necessarily a shared activity. In its fully specified form I believe that this theory must have profound ontological implications, in other words, for how we participate in the being that, via negativity and the imaginary, we are presently helping to bring into being. Iser, I believe, had begun to explain how the greatest works of art and culture enact an interactive, transformative, and emergent way of being in recursion. The exemplifications of emergence that I analyze are from the works of Sophocles, Milton, and Kant.

Eyewitness narratives promise immediacy, the authority of you-are-there witness to the events of the past. Such narratives, however, whether those by comparatively removed witness-observers or those by more directly involved witness-participants, pose difficult problems of distance. How do the limits and possibilities of eyewitness experience contribute to working through the identity concerns that autobiographies typically engage? Revisiting history in their relational autobiographies, Passage to Ararat and Maus, Michael Arlen and Art Spiegelman look to eyewitness narrative to bridge the gap that separates them from their fathers. In her Holocaust memoir, Still Alive, by contrast, Ruth Kluger takes a darker view, exposing the manifold registers of distance -- linguistic, psychological, epistemological -- that complicate her own and any quest to stand at the eyewitness ground zero of biographical and historical knowledge.

The end of the Middle Ages is characterized by significant changes in Mediterranean geopolitics: in Eastern Mediterranean, the Christian powers were driven out by the progression of the Mameluks and the Ottoman Turks. In the Western Mediterranean, however, the Christian powers of the Iberian Peninsula completed the Reconquista. The fall of Acre in 1291, the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and the capture of Granada in 1492 inspired a whole range of narratives from eyewitness reports to indirect and sometimes exagerated accounts. I would like to investigate the process of amplification that provoked the crystallization of some stereotypes related to the lost of the aforementioned cities: the massive massacre of the Christians in Acre reported in the anonymous Chronicle of the Templar of Tyre, the legend of the miraculous transformation of the last Byzantine emperor Constantine XI Paleologos into marble transmitted by Greek folklore, the story of Boabdil gazing for the last time at the Alhambra from a rocky eminence south of Granada. These stories show an interesting interplay between eyewitnesses, amplification nurtured by a high dose of nostalgia, and reminiscences of older narratives related to the topos of the capture of such antique cities as Troy or Carthago. My approach will analyze the process by virtue of which the intertextual processes obliterated the taste of authenticity contained in the genuine eyewitness report.

This paper discusses the challenges posed by the Holocaust and its representations to the practices of the Humanities. The nature of these challenges is brought through an examination of the German Historikerstreit and the French controversies surrounding Heidegger’s relation to the Nazis. The nature of historical representation and its relation to affect are examined in works by Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. The Humanities cannot appropriate the Holocaust but they cannot ignore it either. They face the daunting task of learning how to remember it.

Just as Robert Browning repeatedly speaks through other voices in his poems, so does his admirer and critic A. S. Byatt in her fiction, ventriloquizing her characters’ poems, stories, letters, and even their academic work.  Such writing as Browning’s and Byatt’s can be understood as mediumistic, a channeling of the voices of the dead or the imaginary.  In turn both writers create mediums, Browning in “Mr. Sludge, the ‘Medium’” and Byatt in “The Conjugial Angel,” one of the two novellas set in Victorian England that form Angels and Insects.  Like Browning’s Sludge, Byatt’s mediums, Sophy Sheekhy and Lilias Papagay, function as figures of the creative writer.  Byatt has described Lilias as a “novelist manqué” and Sophy as poet-like.  Sludge is critically acknowledged to be a figure of corruption in art, and through him Browning explores the narrative artist’s inevitable negotiations between truth, fiction, and lies.  Sludge’s spiritualist activities are clearly aimed at the greater glory of Sludge.  Byatt’s mediums, however, are genuinely involved with the mourners and the mourned in the liminal world in which they move.  Lilias brings comfort to a bereaved mother, while Sophy transforms the life of Emily Tennyson Jesse, for this novella is based on the most famous case of protracted Victorian mourning, that for Arthur Henry Hallam, the subject of Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H.  Browning condemns his character by implication for Sludge’s wish that other people should “participate in Sludgehood.”  Byatt represents Lilias and Sophy as intensely aware of others beside themselves.  Thus both through their acts of ventriloquism and through their narratives and characters, Browning and Byatt demonstrate a shared anti-solipsistic aesthetic in texts involving the writer as medium.  They turn in imagination to what is outside themselves and represent either negatively (through Sludge) or positively (through Sophy and Lilias) the value of such outward movement.

from Notes on Contributors June Sturrock Simon Fraser University   January 2009: June Sturrock is an Emeritus Professor of English at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, where she continues to teach occasionally in the Graduate Liberal Studies Programme.  Her publications include about sixty articles and book chapters, Heaven and Home:  Charlotte Yonge’s Domestic Fiction and the Victorian Debate about Women, and an edition of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.  Forthcoming are a book on nineteenth century domestic fiction and several more articles.

As readers, we sometimes have the impression that texts “know” more than their authors ever did. The article refers to this type of (supposed) textual knowledge as latency. It argues that, if there is no direct, methodological, deductive or inductive way towards that which appears to be latent, the Stimmung (mood, atmosphere) produced by the text, as a maximally light and yet invariably physical environment, can become a symptom of what remains latent -- without transforming latency into a situation of open excess. Thus, for instance, in Thomas Mann’s novella “Death in Venice” the detailed descriptions of the ever changing weather of Venice produce in the reader what is best described as a mood — a quasi-physical certainty of being in the presence of something latent, that will eventually reveal itself as a longing for death permeating the homoerotic desire that has overcome the protagonist.

In those cases where long processes of crystallization of latency do not lead to situations of evidence, the intervention of our judgment is required -- the intervention of a judgment that can make itself dependent on better or worse reasons but will never be regarded as exclusively true, or exclusively adequate.