Addressing his colleague Paul Fry who has recently published Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are, the author of the article places Fry’s book within the context of major issues in Wordsworth criticism and explains his difference from Fry’s ontic (atheologic and non-transcendental) emphasis.

This essay analyzes Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White in relation to the 1856 murder trial thought to have inspired it: that of William Palmer, the notorious “Rugeley Poisoner,” a physician accused of poisoning his patients under the guise of medicating them. While most critics have followed Collins’s lead in emphasizing the format of the legal trial – specifically, its sequence of testifying witnesses – as the inspiration behind the novel’s then-innovative rotating cast of narrators, for Tucker, the Palmer trial illuminates The Woman in White as much by way of its status as a revelatory moment in the history of modern anatomical medicine as it does as a moment in British legal history. The difficulty of definitely distinguishing between clinically salutary medicating and criminal poisoning that made Palmer’s crimes possible and their prosecution vexing also served to point up some fundamental contradictions at the heart of anatomical medicine’s claim to be able to diagnose what goes on in the interiors of sick patients’ bodies, claims that rest upon the presumption of the interchangeability of human bodies. The plot of Collins’s novel details the process of this interchange of bodies rather than simply presuming such interchangeability, and as a consequence makes apparent some of the mid-century challenges attendant upon the effort to recognize, identify and control particular bodies through time, as they age, sicken, die.

This essay argues that Keats’s Isabella and Hyperion not only present the aesthetics of suffering (“Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self”) but also reveal that within profound loss and pain there lie ethical possibilities that can be discovered through fidelity to existential and psychological uncertainty, or in Keats’s terms, through lingering “at the yawning tomb.”  As Isabella inconsolably weeps over her pot of basil and Saturn lies “nerveless” on the earth, the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of a state of total uncertainty and doubt are explored in the poems. A re-reading of these two poems suggests that negative capability is often attained by an encounter with the ultimate mystery, death, an experience that challenges and even overwhelms the subject’s sense of identity. Situated within a complex matrix of ontology, epistemology, and ethics, Keats’s concept of negative capability suggests that an encounter with death is not merely a disaster -- it also serves as a self-negation that forcibly empties the mind of personal, social, and historical certainty. This emptied mind is then capable of imagining hitherto unforeseen ethical possibilities. Keats’s negative capability then, beyond its aesthetic productivity, suggests that within traumatic loss there lies the potential for fundamental socio-political reorientation.

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.

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.

The paper reads Bakhtin’s philosophical itinerary through the prism of continental philosophy in an attempt to reconstruct the philosopher's conception of subjectivity from the incomplete corpus of his surviving works. The introductory section focuses on the work of Henri Bergson, suggesting that his privileging of time over space in the theory of the “durée,” formulated at the turn of the twentieth century, is a response to this ancient paradox of omniscience vs. free will, which serves as the point of departure for the work of Bakhtin and some of his continental contemporaries (notably Merleau-Ponty and Levinas). The discussion then focuses on the transition in Bakhtin’s work from the early essay “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” (ca. 1922--1924), where the conception of authorial omniscience is founded on a synchronic and ocular paradigm, to Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929; 2^nd ed. 1963), which inaugurates, according to Bakhtin, a “small-scale Copernican revolution.”

            The full implications of this revolution, philosophical rather than literary, become clearer if we relate it to the “chronotope of liminality,” which is at the very core of Dostoevsky’s work, a persistent questioning of physical, cultural, and psychological boundary-lines and enclosures. I would suggest that Bakhtin extrapolates the same conception of liminality to the workings of the genre of the novel, to discourse as such, and ultimately to the dynamics of ethical subjectivity which is, by definition, non-coincident with itself and, as such, refuses  be subsumed and enframed under the gaze of an authorial other. The principle of polyphony which informs Dostoevsky’s work, and the irreducibly dialogic quality of his characters’ discourse, inaugurate a radical shift, a Bakhtinian rather than Dostoevkian revolution, in the conception of both inter-subjectivity and intra-subjectivity: from the ocular to the auditory, from synchrony to diachrony; and, most significantly, from aesthetics to ethics.

One of the most powerful and influential narratives in Western culture is the apocalyptic plot, derived from Christian eschatology, which describes the transition from a polluted, fallen world to a pure, crystalline millennium. This transition involves a protracted period of suffering and catastrophes known as the Tribulations.
            The apocalyptic plot expresses a linear, teleological concept of temporality, in which chronology supersedes duration. It constitutes a common feature of many ostensibly disparate political and cultural phenomena: from Christian fundamentalism to radical Islam; from disaster movies to ecological nightmares.
            This paper analyzes the apocalyptic interplay of narrative chronology and duration by discussing J. G. Ballard's Four Elements Quartet -- The Wind from Nowhere (1961), The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1964), and The Crystal World (1966). Each novel presents a version of the apocalypse linked to one of the four traditional elements: air, water, fire, and earth. But their real focus is not on apocalyptic chronology but on catastrophic duration. They illuminate the postmodern fascination with the apocalypse as an aesthetic experience, while questioning its ideological premises.
            Ballard's novels expose the apocalyptic desire that animates so much of postmodern experience of time and history. Ballard's catastrophic duration challenges the ideological constructions of the apocalyptic plot, whether in religious millenarianism or in secular utopianism, and opposes them with a focus on corporeal experience and psychic endurance. Both thematically and structurally, the Four Elements Quartet resonates with Albert Camus' anti-millenarian statement: "Don't wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day."

The paper charts the philosophical fate of a syntactic trope:  from the allusion to Dickens’s early deployment of syllepsis in Pickwick Papers as a “category-mistake” (going home “in a flood of tears and a sedan chair”), leading example in Gilbert Ryle’s attack on Descartes’s mind/body dualism, down through the resistance to an either/or deadlock in the philosophically inflected poetics of such different writers as Allen Grossman and Giorgio Agamben.  Revealing the cognitive equivocations of this mostly (but not exclusively) comic grammar in Dickens, examples from his late work (in comparison to the trope’s narrative deployment from Edgeworth through Eliot to Hardy and James) summon not just a logical tension but a tacit ethics of attention, one open to revisionary impulses operating against the tread of syntactic regimentation.  Among other results, relations of body to mind often take the form of a phrase’s splay between a literal and a figurative sense -- a supposed dichotomy that the jolt of syllepsis calls one to rethink.

That Conrad’s novels and shorter tales are rife with dangerous women has often been noted. Typically, the beauty, exoticism and richly sexual allure of these women threaten the protagonists’ self-possession that is tantamount, for them and for Conrad, to masculine integrity and self worth. But woman in these fictions constitutes a threat not only to the protagonists’ success, survival, or well being, but to the coherence of Conrad’s texts. Deeply embedded in an ancient and persistent tradition that identifies woman with truth itself, woman in Conrad is an emblem of dangerous or forbidden knowledge. Her pervasive presence, then, is both a symbol and an effective cause of the narratives’ ambivalent attitude toward revelation, discovery, and truth. Fascinating, promising, and seductive, like truth itself, she draws the internal seeker and the author on. Menacing and forbidden, she thwarts all efforts at possession. Beginning with evidence of the explicit identification of woman with truth in Conrad’s fictions, the essay focuses on the literary, philosophical, mythic, and psychological history of the equation, connecting her variegated representations in the texts with comparable images of woman in these sources.