Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Notes on Contributors viii
4. Acknowledgements xiv
5. Foreword xv
6. Introduction: There Can Be No Doubt – The Reading of J. Hillis Miller 1
7. I Singular Hardy
8. 1. Varieties of Rural Experience: Country Communities in Virginia and Wessex 13
9. 2. ‘There were three men came out of the west’: Experiencing the Rural or, the Ghosts of Community – a ‘Response’ for J. Hillis Miller 52
10. 3. ‘What consciousness grasps’: ‘silent knowing’ and the Natural World in Hardy’s Poetry 83
11. 4. The Hills Have Eyes 100
12. II Self and World
13. 5. J. Hillis Miller’s Hopkins: Poet of the Anthropocene 117
14. 6. Walter Pater in the Wilderness 135
15. 7. ‘This world is now thy pilgrimage’: William Michael Rossetti’s Cognitive Maps of France and Italy 170
16. 8. Personal and Political Fainéance in George Gissing’s Veranilda 184
17. 9. Great Expectations: Narration, Cognition, Possibility 202
18. III Histories, Historicities
19. 10. How Not to Historicise a Poem: On McGann’s ‘Light Brigade’ 223
20. 11. Hellenising the Roman Past: Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean and Anthony Trollope’s Life of Cicero 239
21. 12. The Ghost in the Machinal: De-/Re-contextualising Daniel Deronda 254
22. 13. J. Hillis Miller’s All Souls’ Day: Formalism and Historicism in Victorian and Modern Fiction Studies 284
23. IV Strange Pleasures
24. 14. The Comedian as the Letter C: Wit in Martin Chuzzlewit 299
25. 15. Dickens’s Theatre of Shame 316
26. 16. Critical Listening and Rhetorical Reading: Performative Utterance in George Eliot’s Felix Holt 332
27. 17. Repetition and/of/in Victorian Pleasures 346
28. 18. Philanthropic Rot in Print Run for Profit: The Tu-Quoque- Time-Bomb in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness 358
29. V Interviews
30. 19. The Pleasure of That Obstinacy: An Interview with J. Hillis Miller 387
31. 20. Toward an Appreciation of the Victorian Umwelt: An Interview with J. Hillis Miller 400
32. Afterword
33. Dickens in My Life 409
34. Bibliography 418
35. Index 441