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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.

Resume L’inspiration de ce texte remonte a une exposition qui s’est tenue a New York en 2011, Rooms with a View, et qui etait consacree a une image clef de la peinture du XIXe siecle, ou des personnes, surtout solitaires, surtout feminines, se trouvent debout pres d’une fenetre ouverte. J’essaie de montrer que ce motif est aussi tres present dans l’œuvre de Dickens, et que parmi les differents sens que l’on peut lui donner, il y a manifestement l’idee de la « persistance ». Je m’attache ici surtout a Little Dorrit, ou cette image a une importance particuliere, du fait que le roman se deroule principalement dans des prisons, reelles ou virtuelles. Des l’enfance, l’heroine se trouve constamment devant des fenetres ouvertes, et la patience de cette Griselda est recompensee a la fin.

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).

For John Callahan Everyone knows that F. Scott Fitzgerald came from St. Paul, Minnesota, but fewer are aware that the city was originally French-Canadian. Before 1841 it was just a hamlet called L'Oeil du Cochon (Pig's Eye) after a tavern established by trapper Pierre Parrant. In 1841 the first Catholic missionary resident in Minnesota, Father Lucien Galtier from the Ardeche, raised the tone of the place by giving it a more respectable name. His colleague Joseph Cretin, the first bishop of St. Paul, went on to establish the city's cathedral and contribute toward making the town the "middle-class, dull, unpoetical and fettering" center of Midwestern Catholicism that Shane Leslie felt it had become by the early twentieth century (qtd. in Meyers 11). Many of its established inhabitants were thus of French origin, and they tended to look down on later settlers and coreligionists, in particular the Irish. The fact that the St. Paul Fitzgeralds had their own patrician pretensions no doubt complicated their relation to these French top dogs. Scott's parents Edward and Mary had spent their honeymoon in 1890 on the French Riviera, of which, according to LeVot, "Mary retained an enchanted memory" (10). Judging by a letter of 1909, Edward seems to have spelled his daughter's name the French way ("Mother and Annabelle are very well and enjoying Duluth" (Bruccoli and Duggan 5), and perhaps the family may have meditated more generally on the name Fitzgerald in the Franco-Irish context of the city. Irish fitz is of course French fils, and some of these Midwestern "Sons of Gerald" may have felt that the name they bore had a sufficiently aristocratic ring to entitle them to look the city's French Catholic nabobs in the eye. At any rate, Fitzgerald would later satirically encode aristocratic pretension in "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" by providing the founder of the Montana Washington dynasty with the sonorous Anglo-Franco-Irish Christian name Fitz-Norman Culpeper (Jazz Age 291). In the St. Paul years of his childhood, Fitzgerald grew up surrounded by French names, with whose sounds, I shall suggest, he became fascinated, which had significant consequences for his writing. French, I want to show, became for him a language of dreams expressing fantasies of glamour, elegance, sexual conquest, and upward social mobility--even if all these were equally understood by his daytime consciousness as pretensions offering apt targets for social satire. I shall also examine how failing to speak French well becomes a symptom, in Tender Is the Night in particular, of a cardinal Fitzgerald preoccupation with failure tout court, and perhaps of a more general modernist preoccupation with decline and dissolution. Minnesota is full of French names, and so is Fitzgerald's fiction. In This Side of Paradise, where Amory Blaine and Froggy Parker are given to strolling through Minneapolis "in the balmy air of August night, dreaming along Hennepin and Nicollet Avenues" (17), wandering down streets named after seventeenth-century French explorers. Fitzgerald himself spent his 1909 summer holiday at Frontenac, named after the governor general of New France, and commemorates this fact in the story "Three Hours between Planes," where Nancy Gifford attempts to recall "unspeakable" holiday sexual exploration there: "It was at Frontenac--the summer we--we used to go to the cave" (Collected Stories 577). Frontenac, Hennepin, Nicollet: the names clearly resonate, and later perhaps generate, inter alia, Nicole, the daughter of Devereux Warren. On the basis of such evidence, it would be profitable to take a new look at Fitzgerald's French. His daughter Scottie certainly agreed with the judgment upon his "horrendous French" (qtd. in Meyers 110) and "atrocious accent" by all those who heard him speak the language. He was thoroughly aware of his drastic linguistic limitations, mocking his habit of Franglais on several occasions in his letters: "'Je suis a stranger here,' I said in flawless French. …

Cet article propose une lecture critique de la présence de Nietzsche dans la culture et la littérature australiennes, selon l'évolution de son influence ambigüe à travers différents textes. Si on note en partie des phénomènes assez douteux - pleins de misogynie, de xénophobie et de racisme, comme le roman This Love Business de John Fearn, on trouve aussi des chefs d’œuvres de la littérature australienne inspirés de Nietzsche, comme le roman Voss de Patrick White.This article traces some aspects of Nietzsche's presence in Australian culture and literature, following its evolving, ambiguous influence through different texts, from dubious vulgarizations full of misogyny, xenophobia and racism - like John Fearn's This Love Business - to masterpieces of Australian literature like Patrick White's Voss.Una lectura crítica de la presencia de Nietzsche en la cultura australiana, por la que se sigue la evolución de su ambigua influencia a través de diferentes textos. Por una parte, se dan aspectos bastantes sospechosos - huellas de misoginia, xenofobia y racismo - en textos como This Love Business de John Fearn; por otra, hay obras maestras australianas inspiradas en Nietzsche, como Voss de Patrick White.

This is the revised version of a paper first gi ven at a conference to celebrate thecentenary of the birth of Walter Benjamin (1892-1990), which was held at theGoethe Institut in Sydney in July 1992. Given the rather specialised audience it initally addressed, it may be useful to append here some introductory remarks aimed at readers who may be less familiar with Benjamin's work, especially since the main focus here, the famous 'Arcades' project, remains untranslated. The Arcades project was the main focus of Benjamin 's work during the period of his exile from Nazi Germany, from 1933 until his suicide on the Franco-Spanish border at Port Bou. It began life in 1928 as an essay he intended to write in collaboration with his friend Franz Hessel (the 'Jules' ofTruffault' s Jules et Jim) on the historical and dialectical significance of the Paris arcades, a subject that seized his imagination in part through an impassioned reading of Aragon's surrealist portrayal, in 1£ Paysan de Paris, of a particular arcade that was about to be demolished: the Passage de I'Opera. Like many modernist projects, creative as well as intellectual -compare Musil's The Man Without Qualities, for instance-the subject just grew and grew, and perhaps could never have been brought to a conclusion. For its aim was to provide not only a complete historical and philosophical analysis of nineteenth-century capitalism through a method of microscopic focus upon empirical detail but also a psychological and political programme for 'waking up' outofthedream state of the consumer society.