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This essay is a meditation on the binary title of Middlemarch, and in particular on the first of the two semantic elements that comprise it. I coin the term “middleness” to describe the human state in the book, as it is explored “in the middest” both of time and space, and examine it along three axes, one temporal—to do with the consciousness of living in the middle of history—and two spatial. The first of these latter is horizontal, with reflections on the nature of the setting in the very centre of England, Loamshire or Warwickshire, and the psycho-geographical effects of this setting upon the characters in the novel; and the second is vertical, with reflections on the focus of persons standing essentially in the middle of the social hierarchy. I attempt to uncover discrimination between those characters who manage to achieve a chosen and considered position in relation to “middleness”—that is to say mediocritas in its Horatian sense—and those who are merely “mediocre” in its modern sense.

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This paper examines the frequent use of the word ‘blighty’ in First World War poetry and prose to signify from the frontline trenches the longedfor world of home. A word of Anglo-Indian origin, the product of folk etymology, as unlettered soldiers convert ‘bilayati’ meaning ‘foreign’ into something that sounds more familiar in English, it retains its association with the speech of the common soldier in First World War poetry. It modulates in meaning, as the war gets increasingly desperate, and starts in poetry and elsewhere to refer to a relatively minor wound that will get you back home and out of the war. I examine this shift in a number of poets, notably Owen, Sassoon, and Gurney. I also examine the experience of ‘blighty’ from the other end of the telescope, so to speak. That is to say, from the perspective of women writers receiving their men at home and bidding them farewell for the last time. I illustrate such writing in the distinguished novel World Without End by Helen Thomas, the widow of the war poet Edward Thomas.

Dickens was conscious of the ubiquity of ruins in a capitalist society operating on the principle of obsolescence. In Bleak House, for instance, the legal system is one source of them, as buildings rot and decay during the process of interminable trials. Contemplating them, he regularly blurs the distinction between inanimate ruins and ruined human beings, following in the footsteps of Romantic writers like Byron and Heine before him. This essay examines the thematic implications of this complex of associations and looks at Dickens’s experience of the classical ruins at Rome and elsewhere in relation to his view of their modern counterparts.

This chapter takes as its starting point Dickens’s proximity—first, in childhood, and later, from 1856 onwards—to the Dover Road, arguing that this thoroughfare governs his thinking about travel and motion. Besides serving as the major vehicle of traffic between London and Europe, it was also a route of pilgrimage to Canterbury. Steeped in Bunyan, Dickens thus tended to think of the journey along it as an allegory of the progress of human life towards death. But his travels and travel writing should not be thought of solely in terms of a teleology. He himself distinguishes between purposeful travel and strolling or ‘flânerie’, and his two major travel books, on America and Italy respectively, explore both interconnectedly. Equally, his novels oscillate between picaresque linearity and an emphasis on circularity and stasis, these latter foremost in his last work.

With Cristobal Perez Barra (Chile), Peter Bergsma (The Netherlands), Reinhild Böhnke (Germany), Miguel Temprano Garcia (Spain) and Jinghui Wang (China).It was my privilege to be asked to chair a panel on translating J.M. Coetzee at the very end of the ‘Reading Coetzee’s Women’ Conference held at the Monash Campus in Prato, Italy from 27 to 29 September 2016, and now, to present an account of that occasion which contains versions, either of the papers presented at the meeting itself by three of the four invited participants who were able to attend, or submitted to me by two others who could not.The text of the contributions has been very lightly edited by me on the few occasions where it seemed this might help to convey the writer’s meaning with maximum clarity in idiomatic contemporary English, and then submitted to the author for approval. In the same way a draft of the following essay as a whole has been submitted to all the participants for comment or suggested amendment. The result, I hope, is that this essay can be considered in large measure as collaborative work – or, indeed, a conversation.Inevitably, the range of languages covered here is very partial, and indeed, a matter of chance. Before the conference began we were worried that, as a result of participants accepting and then finding themselves forced to withdraw and send in messages to be read on their behalf, real live translators would be rather thin on the ground, reduced to stalwart representatives from Holland and Italy. But we were in luck, discovering as conference delegates arrived that among them were two more Coetzee translators. Furthermore, these were of special interest: representing China and South America respectively, they would enable us to move out beyond the Eurocentric focus originally envisaged. Since both of them kindly agreed to take part at very short notice, we could go a little further than we had hoped, offering a glimpse of the world reception of a writer who, unquestionably, already belongs in his lifetime to Goethean Weltliteratur.

Very shortly after the golden age of the Modernist City Novel – Petersburg (1913), Ulysses (1922), Manhattan Transfer and Mrs Dalloway (1925), Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) – a work of comparable stylistic brilliance and originality was published by an Australian writing about an Australian city. Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney was in fact finished as early as 1930, but the London publisher who accepted it early in 1931 insisted that she write a more conventional book before he would finally risk publication in 1934 (Rowley 137ff).