This essay traces the development of the new men of sensibility in Wilkie Collins' fiction, arguing that while his early novels subscribe to mid-Victorian ideals of manliness, his later fiction eschews muscular masculinity, anticipating the rise of a new fin-de-siècle anti-hero, but also harking back to the sentimental heroes of the eighteenth-century novel of sentiment or sensibility. This shift is connected to a sentimental reaffirmation of nostalgia, lovesickness, and love at first sight as well as to a corresponding redefinition of the villains, whose vitality contrasts with a series of very similar feminized hypersensitive heroes. The pining of lovesick and nostalgic men of sensibility is being reclaimed from allegations of effeminacy as well as from Victorian pathologies and instead praised as a virtue. To map this development, the essay takes a close look at the mental, moral, and bodily strengths and weaknesses of Wilkie Collins' (anti-)heroes and also at their relationship with formidable and robust women - a relationship that sheds an intriguing light on gender issues in Victorian fiction.

This essay examines the work of Anna Margolin (1887-1952), an exemplary case of Yiddish poetry's straddling of the tension between the tenets of world modernism, on the one hand, and the demands of Jewish culture's normative claims to morality, on the other. Margolin's work deploys notions of poetry's ability to mimic artistic and visual media, a discourse typifying Imagist trends in modernism; however, the medium of the Yiddish language presents a challenge to this visualising practice, given its unavoidable, orthographic connection to Hebrew, and thus to traditional Jewish prohibitions on visual representation. The resulting tension finds expression within Margolin's work through a variety of stylistic devices, and through an engagement with modernist poetry in other languages, including Pound, Rilke and Mandelstam. Margolin's observation and synthesis of modernism from the relative margins of Yiddish creativity, provides a lens for re-evaluating the relation of canonicity, multilingualism and gender.