Nineteenth-century English and American travelers in Europe elaborated an “authenticity effect,” a rhetoric whose figures testify to the authenticity of sights seen and experiences undergone. Largely through the adaptation of picturesque conventions, visitors' gazes produced a touristic “Europe” consisting of distinctive, essential features that marked foreign places off from familiar domestic society. Acting out the evolving division of culture and society, the tour abroad defined home (England or America) as the increasingly anomic domain of work and compromised social existence, abroad (the Continent or “Europe”) as the compensatory realm of culture and, therefore, of human feeling, meaningfulness, and wholeness. In this figuration of (foreign but accessible) cultures as wholes expressing their essences in particular, instantaneously perceptible arrangements of parts, nineteenth-century tourism bridges Romantic-symbolist aesthetics and the professional anthropology of the early twentieth century. Placed at the center of the century-long bridge, the young Henry James wrote a series of travel essays in the 1870s that both forecast his later fiction and reveal the disquieting implications of the picturesque perspective. (JB)

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and “An Outpost of Progress” appropriate and subvert Herbert Spencer's influential “typology of civilization.” While these fictions invoke Spencer's crucial opposition of “militant” and “industrial” society, they ultimately undermine his progressivistic theory by expunging the difference between these oppositions. They accomplish this by showing that, in Europe's colonization of Africa, militancy and industrialism are mutually reinforcing tendencies rather than mutually exclusive ones and that Spencer's celebration of civilization and progress ultimately justifies imperialism and obscures the existence of a “military-industrial complex.” In addition, Lord Jim provides interesting alternatives to and modified examples of Conrad's intersection with Spencerian ideas. (BWS)

When read in the context of the European discourse on China since the Enlightenment, Kafka's “Constructing the Great Wall of China” (1917) and one of its likely sources, Dittmar's travelogue In New China (1912), reveal their political and cultural significance as early-twentieth-century conceptualizations of China during the late Ch'ing dynasty. Caught in the conflict between empirical observation and textual preconceptions, Dittmar manipulates orientalist discourse in his colonialist construction of Chinese progress guided by the Western powers. Surpassing his precursor in self-reflective insight into the rhetoricity of orientalism, Kafka appropriates the recurrent topoi of this field for an ironic exploration of the interactions among power, language, and sociopolitical stagnation. Kafka's story can be read as an intertextual subversion of Dittmar's Eurocentric ideology, as a response to the shattered hopes for revolutionary change after the fall of the Ch'ing dynasty, and as a critique of orientalist discourse in general. (RJG)

Italo Calvino's “Sotto il sole giaguaro” (“Under the Jaguar Sun”), a story about the sense of taste, is the culmination of his lifelong research on desire; it presents and analyzes all the primary functions of food, from the satisfaction of a biological need to the possibility of transgression, from the narrative sign to the cognitive tool used to outline the problematic relation among self, others, and the world (or among subject, nature, and history). “Sotto il sole giaguaro” deals with the dialectics of logos, sitos, and eros in an extremely original manner, by foregrounding primary images (like the female protagonist's mouth and the jaguar sun of the title) and by combining the narration of a tourist's journey with a love story and an anthropological inquiry into Aztec cannibalism. In this beautiful and challenging text, gastronomy fuses within itself anthropology and eroticism, while the underlying discourse probes the nature of literature. (G-PB)

To begin, I will confide in you a feeling. Already on the subject of headings [caps]—and of the shores on which I intend to remain. It is the somewhat weary feeling of an old European. More precisely, of someone who, not quite European by birth, since I come from the southern coast of the Mediterranean, considers himself, and more and more so with age, to be a sort of overacculturated, overcolonized European hybrid. (The Latinate words culture and colonization have a common root, there where it is precisely a question of what happens to roots.) In short, it is perhaps the feeling of someone who, as early as grade school in French Algeria, must have tried to capitalize, and capitalize upon, the old age of Europe, while at the same time keeping a little of the indifferent and impassive youth of the other shore. Keeping, in truth, all the marks of an ingenuity still incapable of this other old age from which French culture had, from very early on, separated him.

Olaudah Equiano manipulates the binary terms of racial representation in eighteenth-century England to establish himself as at once a reasoning black subject and, paradoxically, as what I term a “transgressive” subject: one who refuses any definitive racial (perhaps even social) categorization. A profile of the transgressive I in his autobiography reveals a fluid positioning rather than an essence. Initially identified as an African slave, Equiano goes on to depict his narrative self as a social reformer, someone both in and of English society whose differences with it seem resolvable within the existing order. When he suddenly reintroduces evidence of the narrative self's liminal status, therefore, white readers perceive a revolutionary challenge to the binary logic of their social world. Out of this ambiguity arises the possibility that individual and collective identities might be reimagined in a nonbinary mode. Moreover, subsequent black narrators have inherited Equiano's liberating ability to envision a transgressive self. (SMM)

Proverbs and tales are closely related; a tale's lesson is declared at its beginning or summarized at its end by a general wisdom saying that can circulate and attach itself to different tales. Tale-based proverbs, in discourse, are either plot summaries or tag lines. They allude to stories in the cultural inventories of communities, and they are high signs between speaker and listener. Generally, by reminding the hearer of the circumstances of a familiar story, the speaker recommends a course of action or warns against it. Spanish Jews, exiled from Spain in 1492 and subsequently resident in North Africa and in the Ottoman Empire, shared a corpus of maxims, which have been assembled in collections. Some of these proverbs are inaccessible because their narrative contexts are forgotten; some survive because they contain powerful images that send clear messages without narrative context. Other sayings will be generated as new popular stories gain currency. (HG)

Flaubert's representation of the 1848 revolution in L'éducation sentimentale brings irony and the sublime into a relation of simultaneous opposition and dependency. An uncertain irony constructs the revolution as an aporia: as both an impoverished imitation of 1789 (a cliché) and a tragic modern apocalypse. Particularly in the famous Fontainebleau episode, where the rhetorical violence of irony is enacted in the analogy between the awesome turbulence of nature and the chaos of a nonteleological historical process, irony gives rise to the affects of fear and transport characteristic of the sublime. And the turn from an uncanny irony to the countermode of self-empowerment is set in motion by the same fear of death that haunts the novel's historiographical intertext, the Micheletist cliché of resurrection. But while the Micheletist sublime constructs a version of historical and ontological truth, the Flaubertian sublime transforms meaninglessness itself into power. Reified as ideology, that power would be neither inflexible nor monolithic, for it emerges and recedes repeatedly in the context of a self-interrogating and fundamentally ironic narrative. (VKR)

The Mill on the Floss is divided between two sibling narratives. This essay argues that the effect of each and of the rivalry between them is a critique of the novel's nominal status as Bildungsroman. Shoving Tom Tulliver's story of self-culture off to the side and insisting on its moral insufficiency, Eliot displaces the classic apprenticeship from the center of her text; dramatizing Maggie Tulliver's difficulty in even entering this story, she stages the genre's tendency to preclude a female protagonist. Maggie's trouble with formation corresponds to Eliot's trouble with the novel of formation. Eventually I ask what the uncomfortable fit between The Mill and the Bildungsroman reveals not only about this work but also about this category; placing early-1970s formulations of the Bildungsroman in the context of emergent American feminist criticism, I indicate what some of the genre's ideological uses have been. Finally, the dialogic structure of The Mill may invite a more relational mapping of development and suggest retheorizing the novel of development as an instance of cultural debate about formation. (SF)