Lucy Strange, the protagonist of Gail Jones’ Sixty Lights (2004), can be seen as an early example of a global citizen. Travelling between the periphery and the center of the British Empire, Lucy repeatedly makes sea-journeys that last for months — a kind of journey that no longer exists in today’s world. Although this travelling helps shape her identity, it also makes her incapable of calling any one location her home. This article discusses the portrayal of Lucy as a modern 19^th-century woman who is simultaneously a 21^st century, neo-Victorian creation. It analyzes the links between femininity and voyages in the novel. Lucy’s travels serve to depict the movement of women and mothers across the sea as an inherent part of globalization, writing them into what was often seen as a development led by male adventurers and businessmen. Jones presents Lucy as a young woman at the edge of modernity. Nevertheless, Lucy’s lack of rootedness also questions whether travelling requires different — more modern — constructions of female identity.

This article traces literary depictions of the city of Haifa, starting from its utopian literary prototype in Theodor Herzl’s influential Altneuland (1902), and continuing with later Israeli writing, by Yehudit Hendel, Sami Michael, and Hillel Mittelpunkt. The article shows how the Israeli works discussed set literary Haifa as a stage for examining questions of identity, belonging, and the relations between individual and society, through an emphasis on the complex ties between language, ethnicity, and space. The literary city of these works is compared to the city of Herzl’s utopian vision. I argue that the evolution of literary Haifa is associated  with shifts in Israeli collective self-perception: from the utopian mode of thought, in which difficulties and complexities remain invisible, through the gradual turning of the gaze towards the difficulties and fractures in the emergent new society (first within the Jewish society, but then also outside it — among the Arab minority); and finally, to an inability to accept the absence of utopia from the present, leading to escapism and a quest for the longed-for ideal in the pre-national past.

This article traces the ways in which memories of historical trauma inscribed in the built environment of Buenos Aires, Lima, and Cusco inform the fiction of Argentine Tununa Mercado and Peruvian Karina Pacheco Medrano. Each author represents fictional cityspaces after projects of public memorialization have already begun to carve out spaces of memory in response to dictatorship (Argentina) and to the conflict with the Shining Path (Peru). These novelists, neither of whom is Jewish, map the relationship between the spatial dimension of the textual and the textual dimension of the spatial, acknowledging the value and meaning of invisibilized Jewish bodies whose presence continues to haunt the modern urban space.

With reference to the establishment of the Venice Ghetto 500 years ago as a landmark in the history of Jewish spaces, the “Introduction” surveys the literary/geographical/cultural spaces of modern Jewish experience discussed in the papers of the forum.

In seventeenth-century literature on the Grand Tour, the ghetto of Venice appears as a place of cross-cultural exchange and misunderstanding, a contact zone that stimulates interrogation and translation, comparison and projection, prejudice and discovery. The ghetto goes into eclipse in the English letters of the Enlightenment, to re-emerge in a number of Victorian texts. The essays of this forum show how the renewed interest in the Italian Ghettoes served two late Victorian writers, Israel Zangwill and Amy Levy, to reflect on their own modern British and Jewish identity.

Jeremy Hawthorn is Emeritus Professor of Modern British Literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. His book The Reader as Peeping Tom: Nonreciprocal Gazing in Narrative Fiction and Film was published by Ohio State University Press in 2014. He has published three monographs and many articles on the fiction of Joseph Conrad and is presently co-editing a volume in the Cambridge University Press Edition of Conrad's works. The fourth edition of his A Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory was published in 2000, and the seventh edition of his textbook Studying the Novel by Bloomsbury Academic in 2017.

updated in March 2019

What is the relation between public notations of time and the personal experience of duration? And how have these two different approaches to temporality been explored in early novels? This article considers Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, arguing that through renderings of objective time and of the experience of duration Defoe differentiates between two different modes of sociality: contractual relations on the one hand and intimate attachments on the other. Furthermore, in these novels Defoe lays the terms for one of the main tropes through which later eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels represent both domesticity (in its inherent duality of love and marriage) and temporality (in its inherent duality of duration and time). This is a trope of parallax view, which captures an important condition of these dualities – that their poles can never be viewed simultaneously even as they coexist in the same phenomena.      

The paper begins by examining the structure of a joke as illustrative of the nature of the selection of things, selves, and others from the Real.  The equivocal character of such selections, even in their very singularity, is brought out and is shown to extend beyond that of the Joke, to the Story and to the process of language.  The mismatch of interpersonal positions is shown to depend upon a tacit understanding that apes the structure of trust.  This blind trust is capable of being developed into a genuine one through the acceptance of the irremediable difference of the other and the risk it involves.

This philosophy of narrative is then tested against Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale where the nature of trust or “trouthe” is one of the central moral concerns. The article questions the various approaches to the dilemmas staged in the Tale, particularly with regard to the nature of marriage, since this is a prime example of the tragicomic trajectories of those who engage in mutual acts of “trouthe.”

Although critics have seen Dickens as having emphasized the individual and domestic life at the expense of politics in A Tale of Two Cities, the novel offers reasons for thinking that Dickens was using it as an occasion for reevaluating our understanding of moral agency in modernity. In emphasizing resemblances that seem to blur the boundaries between individuals, Dickens calls attention to the ways in which we are not morally autonomous, in which our abilities to act are conditioned by our sometimes being taken for others. While that predicament might seem lamentable, Dickens concludes the novel by presenting Sydney Carton as a character who recognizes it well enough to see it as a riddle, and a riddle to be solved.

Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury offers an early exploration of racial and cultural identity within the wider context of a nascent colonial expansion. He and his brother, the poet George Herbert, question dominant notions of race, culture, and color. Their poems bring color associations from abstract theological and philosophical levels to present the intimacy of human contact in intercultural and interracial contexts. The result is a view of human connectedness that affirms equality and commonality over dominant views of European superiority and priority.