It has been said that without George Eliot's last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), "the state of Israel might not exist." In the novel itself, at any rate, the state of Israel only appears as a hazy hypothesis entertained by its narratorial consciousness from within the confines of an implicit European regionalism predicated on English common sense. In Eliot's final fiction, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), the sinister anxieties affecting that common sense in the face of a lurid fantasy of judaeo-techno-capitalist "alienism" of its own making bleed back, generating complications of voice and vision, challenging Eliot's authorship and authority, and straining her text into rhetorical reaction formations indicative of a new crisis in the imagination of human community that all her writing had worked to refine.

The dedicatory poem Aemilia Lanyer wrote for Queen Anne invites the reader to see the verses as a Eucharistic mirror. Despite the volume of critical literature on Salve Deus, Lanyer's uses of sight in the definition of feminine cognition and religious devotion have been ignored. In this article I place Lanyer's use of scopic metaphors within the context of early seventeenth century Protestant idioms of devotion and sight - I thus argue that the aim of Lanyer's work was not only to rewrite Christ's passion or the Original Sin, nor merely to make bid for patronage - it was a femnine re-conception of seeing, reading, and believing which clashed with contemporary ideas of vision and cognition. What Lanyer was doing in her poems was to reconceive both her role as poet and that of the reader's as the two sides of an optic and Eucharistic encounter.

The article sketches the development of the genre of alternate history, also called allohistory and argues that allohistory may be treated as a philosophical genre that meditates on contingency and determinism. It examines two contemporary allohistorical novels, Israeli author Nava Semel's IsraIsland (2005) and American writer Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007), that comment on the role of Israel in the Jewish imagination. The thematic and formal elements of these texts reveal how a version of allohistory can also function as a kind of detective fiction that may influence the reception of historiographic narratives.

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 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.

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.

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.

The article considers cases in which the reader's knowledge of historical events enters into his or her reading of works of fiction published before these events took place, and explores the critical, ethical, and theoretical issues that arise in such instances. The topic is investigated with reference to the fiction of Joseph Conrad, and in particular to his works Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Conrad twice went on record in declaring that the writer "writes only half the book; the other half is with the reader," and yet what exactly the reader's "writing" of a fictional work can or ought to consist of is a notoriously vexed topic. How may we distinguish "legitimate" from "illegitimate" readerly "writings"? What ethical objections to the incorporation of knowledge of actual historical events into our reading of fictional texts that predate these events must we take seriously? Should certain topics such as the Holocaust be treated as off-limits in the reader's "writerly" experience of works of fiction? The article builds on a suggestion by the historian David Wootton that the writer creates a space within which readers may think, and asks whether literary critics should be more willing to add "thinking" to activities such as "responding," "interpreting," and "appreciating" when discussing what literary works allow, encourage, and enable readers to do. It concludes that although seeing the world through our reading of fiction, and enriching our reading of fiction with our knowledge of the world, are both activities that involve ethical challenges and responsibilities, they are activities that are a natural part of the common reader's engagement with works of fiction. They should, accordingly, be made open to discussion rather than subject to taboo and denial.

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.

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.