The essay studies the scene of recognition in four novels by Dickens -- Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, and A Tale of Two Cities. It argues that Dickens’s use of the topos of recognition is linked to a specific view of social reality centered on the belief that the legitimacy of the social order and the place of individuals within it are predicated on continuity. The variations that the four novels offer on this topos should be understood as the means by which Dickens attempts to work out a persuasive way of promoting and protecting this view of social reality in spite of the contradictions and impasses it entails.

This article analyses some seminal novels by Dickens, Disraeli, Gaskell, and Kingsley in their relation to developments in society and welfare of the early Victorian period, inferring from them a social discourse that challenged some but not all aspects of classical political economics. It argues that they reveal a view of society as “trisected,” that is as one in which the realms of production, distribution and reproduction are barely regarded as occupying the same conceptual space. So while some aspects of social policy are deplored, e.g. the workhouse, some of the assumptions and values upon which they were based are upheld. Rather than extensive institutional reform these books demand a new set of ethical coordinates which reflect a growing awareness of the interdependencies of individuals.

Is there a “natural” fit between gender and the pacifist or military impulse? The article traces the trajectory of the thinking on this issue ever since the initiation of women into the peace movements of nineteenth-century Europe, placing it in the context of the general philosophical shift from essentialism to constructivism. It is argued that the demotion of “the maternal” -- the emblem of pacifism since the early 19th century -- took place in the later work of Virginia Woolf, well before the post-gender heydays of the 1980s. Although the term gender was obviously not available to Woolf, she undermined the conventional division between the sexes through her use of the term androgyny, which prepared her to take on the conventional discourse about aggression, war, and maternal pacifism. A contrastive analysis of the uses and abuses of sexual difference and the maternal metaphor in the works of Woolf and the 19th-century pacifist Charlotte Gilman shows that while amalgamating liberal and radical positions, Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938) in fact anticipated – via its hostile dialogue with Freud – not only the gendering of peace and war but also the contemporary psycho-political analyses of the nexus of sexuality and nationalism.

January 2004: Yael S. Feldman is the Abraham I. Katsh Professor of Hebrew Culture and Education and Professor of Comparative Literature at NYU, where she teaches Hebrew and Comparative Literature and Gender Theory. She is Associate Editor of the literary journals Prooftexts and Hebrew Studies. The latest of her five books, No Room of Their Own: Gender and Nation in Israeli Women’s Fiction (Columbia University Press, 1999) was a National Jewish Book Awards Finalist. The Hebrew version, Lelo heder mishelahen (Hakkibutz hameuchad, 2002) won the Abraham Friedman Award for Hebrew Literature (2003). Current research: the nexus of politics and psychoanalysis in theories of peace and in Modern Hebrew culture.

In Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness and Masque of Beauty an early modern argument against colonization is presented by an African character, Niger.  The themes of assimilation and self-determination remain in tension throughout the plays, a quite early recognition of the struggle between cultural identity, race, and global agendas.

This essay proposes to retrace some aspects of the “ethical turn” that affects the humanities today to the codification of “sympathy” in what Geoffrey Hartman has described as Wordsworth’s “rhetoric of community.” Focusing on the figure of the infant in Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain poems, the essay argues for a recovery in Wordsworth’s text of the critique of sympathy accompanying the ideology of sympathy of which he has become a canonical representative. While the ideology of sympathy typically denies the difference sympathy is said to celebrate, Wordsworth’s text is read here as a timely record of this defensive encryption inviting resistance to the current privatization of sympathy as surrogate justice.

Is the society of the Houyhnhnms in Book IV of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels a utopia or a dystopia? Gulliver’s admiring account of Houyhnhnmland is shown to be systematically self-deconstructing in ways which embody a critique of what might be called “Rational Universalism,” a moral theory according to which the demands that lay the strongest obligations on a morally reflective person are those determined by the needs of the most extensive community to which a given person can be held to belong. In presenting the Houyhnhnms as, in effect, a reductio ad absurdum of such ideas, Swift discerned, and criticised, the first stirrings of intellectual impulses at the root of modern totalitarianism.

Is the society of the Houyhnhnms in Book IV of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels a utopia or a dystopia? Gulliver’s admiring account of Houyhnhnmland is shown to be systematically self-deconstructing in ways which embody a critique of what might be called “Rational Universalism,” a moral theory according to which the demands that lay the strongest obligations on a morally reflective person are those determined by the needs of the most extensive community to which a given person can be held to belong. In presenting the Houyhnhnms as, in effect, a reductio ad absurdum of such ideas, Swift discerned, and criticised, the first stirrings of intellectual impulses at the root of modern totalitarianism.