Volume 61, Issue 2

Dorothy Wordsworth’s 1820 Journal of a Tour on the Continent and Mary Shelley’s 1844 Rambles illustrate two 19th-century approaches to the phenomenon of the Grand Tour: the Romantic (a traveller’s) and the anti-Romantic (a tourist’s). In terms of chronology, it would seem that both texts fully represent the Romantic approach to travel. However, this assumption will be tested in the present article. For a discussion thereof, apart from an overview of Chloe Chard’s characteristics of both approaches (1999), John Urry’s observations on tourist gazes (1995) may prove useful, if aspects of the anti-Romantic approach are determined in either text. A detailed examination reveals that Mary Shelley tends towards the concept of tourism rather than explorative travel despite embracing the national problems of her Italian “travelees.” Dorothy Wordsworth’s travelogue, in turn, reflects the attitudes of the Romantic era.

My paper proposes to explore Rossetti’s use of what Jerome McGann has famously called “Rossetti’s significant details” in his poems “My Sister’s Sleep” and “The Blessed Damozel.” I will call into question the relationship between the realistic and symbolic detail in Rossetti’s art. Both poems revolve around the themes of death, personal loss and the ways of coping with grief, and in this way they relate to the mainstream topics of Rossetti’s time. However, his treatment of the deathbed scenes and mourning calls for special attention. Not only does Rossetti subvert the sentimental Victorian convention of excessive display of emotions and makes the poems operate through two, seemingly contradictory systems of meaning - the realistic and the symbolic - but he consciously deconstructs the latter. In effect, the reader confronts the poems’ other sense - the uncovering of the deeply intimate response to personal loss, well beyond any symbolic reading.

This article discusses the ‘omniscient’ narration in many realist novels and the reflector-mode narratives of literary modernism as instances of expanded consciousness that involve blends between human and superhuman features. In both cases, human consciousness gets widened to such a degree that the third-person narrator literally knows the thoughts and feelings of other characters (through techniques such as psychonarration, free indirect discourse, or direct thought), and this correct knowledge of what goes on in ‘other’ minds is impossible in the real world, where we have access to the minds of our fellow human beings but typically have to rely on hypotheses or speculations. The article thus takes issue with the recent claims by Alan Palmer and David Herman who argue that there is no fundamental difference between the reading of minds in the actual world and instances of mind reading in fiction.

Hermione Granger, the only female protagonist in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, is a favourite with fan fiction writers. This character is described in far less detail than the other two main characters: in terms of Wolfgang Iser’s reader response theory, she is a blank to be filled in by the reader. Her popularity among fan writers is due both to her portrayal as a strong, likeable young woman who invites reader identification, and to this quality of inviting the reader’s cooperation in the creation of meaning, and by extension, in recreating her character in the form of fan fiction.

This article traces the history of terror and terrorism from the French Revolution to the present day in order to describe its rhetorical dimension. From the 1790s onwards, a key rhetorical element of terrorism is the creation of an effect of silence and speechlessness which is closely connected with the philosophy and psychology of the sublime. The second half of the paper investigates how Paul Greengrass’ films Bloody Sunday and United 93 , which both deal with the topic of terrorism, transform the rhetorical dimension of a terrorist outrage, the main thesis being that the films appropriate the dimension of silence and speechlessness in order to become monuments of commemoration.