NBOL-19: Books Announced

ACHERAïOU, AMAR
JOSEPH CONRAD AND THE READER: QUESTIONING MODERN THEORIES OF NARRATIVE AND READERSHIP (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) -VF-

Testing deconstructionist theories such as death-of-the-author and text as absolute semiotic sign, this book examines Conrad's ethics of readership and visuality in the light of modern experimentalist writers like Fielding, Sterne, Diderot, and Flaubert, as well as in relation to ancient theories of narrative formulated by Aristotle, Plato, Horace, Quintilian, Cicero, and Plutarch.
To be reviewed by Laurence Davies.

ADAMS, JAMES ELI
A HISTORY OF VICTORIAN LITERATURE (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) xii + 463 pp. -VS-

This collection of essays sets out to challenge the dominant narrative about Victorian theatre by linking its practices and products to Victorian visual culture and also by applying the concept of "Ruskinian theatre," which values the stage for its educative purpose as well as for its aesthetic expression.
Reviewed by David Riede.

ALLEN, JUDITH
THE FEMINISM OF CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN: SEXUALITIES, HISTORIES, PROGRESSIVISM (Chicago, 2009) -AL-WW-

Treating Gilman as a public intellectual in the Progressive era, Judith Allen assesses her feminism by exploring her theories of sexuality and her evolutionary analyses of androcentric--or male-dominated--culture. Allen shows how these ideas informed Gilman's many contributions to the suffrage movement, the fight to abolish regulated prostitution, and efforts to legalize birth control.
To be reviewed by Cynthia J. Davis.

ARONDEKAR, ANJALI
FOR THE RECORD: ON SEXUALITY AND THE COLONIAL ARCHIVE IN INDIA (Duke, Fall 2009) -LP-

Through readings of literary texts and legal documents from colonial India. Arondekar explores conceptions of loss and sexuality. He also challenges the common assumption in postcolonial studies that the subaltern exists at the periphery of textual documentation, rather than the center.
To be reviewed by Josna Rege.

BAR-YOSEF, EITAN AND NADIA VALMAN
'THE JEW' IN LATE-VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN CULTURE: BETWEEN THE EAST END AND EAST AFRICA (PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2009) xii + 241 pp. -LR-

The turbulent period from the Boer War to the introduction of the Aliens Act was marked by contradictory imaginings of 'the Jew,' such as pauper/capitalist and familiar/alien. Moving beyond the racial or cultural dimensions of fin de siecle semitic discourse and highlighting the nexus of Britain, East Africa, and Palestine, this collection considers the wider colonial context in which such ambivalent attitudes to Jews were produced.
Reviewed by Todd Endelman.

BAUER, HEIKE
ENGLISH LITERARY SEXOLOGY: TRANSLATIONS OF INVERSION, 1860-1930 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) xi + 216 pp. -LSX-

It is well known that much of our modern vocabulary of sex emerged within nineteenth-century German sexology. But how were the "German ideas" translated and transmitted into English culture? This study examines the formation of sexual theory between the 1860s and 1930s and its migration across national and disciplinary boundaries.
Reviewed by Dustin Friedman.

BAXTER, KATHERINE ISOBEL AND RICHARD J. HAND, EDS.
JOSEPH CONRAD AND THE PERFORMING ARTS (Ashgate, 2009) viii + 165 pp. -DR-LVA-VF-

Foregrounding one of the most interesting and nascent areas of Conrad studies, this collection examines major and neglected works within the context of the performing arts, including popular theatrical traditions, early cinema, shadow plays, Shakespeare, and opera.
Reviewed by Jeremy Hawthorn.

BEHRENDT, STEPHEN C.
BRITISH WOMEN POETS AND THE ROMANTIC WRITING COMMUNITY (Johns Hopkins, 2009) xiv + 349 pp. -RPO-WW-

Recovering the lost lives and poems of British women poets of the Romantic era. Behrendt reveals the range and diversity of their writings, offering new perspectives on the work of dozens of women whose poetry has long been ignored or marginalized in traditional literary history.
Reviewed by Mary A. Favret.

BEHRENDT, STEPHEN C., ED.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (Longman, 2009) -RPO-

Presenting Shelley as a radical theorist, political reformer, and passionate advocate of individual and civil liberty, this edition sets his work within the context of public events that spurred his writing, from the national outpouring of grief at the death of Princess Charlotte Augusta to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. It also includes political caricatures, selections of radical writing from the popular press, and hostile reviews of Shelley's work in his time.
Reviewed by Stuart Curran.

BENIS, TOBY R.
ROMANTIC DIASPORAS Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) x + 194. -REPR-

Romantic Diasporas examines exile in the Romantic period from the different perspectives of French émigrés in England, British convicts transported to Australia, and Jews in their perennial diaspora.
Reviewed by Todd Endelman.

BERNSTEIN, SUSAN DAVID AND ELSIE MICHIE, EDS.
VICTORIAN VULGARITY (Ashgate, 2009) -LVA-VS-

First used in Victorian England to define language use and class position, vulgarity became implicated in behavior, material possessions, sexuality, and race. Through dictionaries, grammars; essays, journalism, visual art; and fiction by Dickens, Eliot, Gissing, and Trollope, the contributors to this volume explore the troubled history of vulgarity along with its implications for today's writers and artists.
To be reviewed by Ariel Gunn.

BILLITTERI, CARLA
LANGUAGE AND THE RENEWAL OF SOCIETY IN WALT WHITMAN, LAURA (RIDING) JACKSON, AND CHARLES OLSON: THE AMERICAN CRATYLUS (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) xx + 219pp. -AL-

This book takes up the utopian desire for a perfect language of words that give direct expression to the real, known in Western thought as Cratylism, and its impact on the social visions and poetic projects of three of the most intellectually ambitious of American writers: Walt Whitman, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Charles Olson.
Reviewed by Brian Reed.

BLAKE, KATHLEEN
THE PLEASURES OF BENTHAMISM: VICTORIAN LITERATURE, UTILITY, POLITICAL ECONOMY (Oxford, November 2009) 267pp. -VS-

Examining the often-censured but imperfectly understood traditions of Utilitarianism and political economy in their bearing on Victorian literature and culture, this book ranges through the work of Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, James and John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Rabindranath Tagore. In doing so, it also links Victorian literature to both liberalism and imperialism.
Reviewed by Regenia Gagnier.

BRISTOW, JOSEPH, ED.
OSCAR WILDE AND MODERN CULTURE: THE MAKING OF A LEGEND (Ohio, 2009) -VS-

This collection of essays explores the meteoric rise, sudden fall, and legendary resurgence of an immensely influential writer's reputation. More than a hundred years after this celebrated London dramatist was sent to prison for committing acts of "gross indecency," this volume shows why his value in the academic world, the auction house, and the entertainment industry stands higher than that of any modern writer.
To be reviewed by Patricia Behrendt.

BUSHELL, SALLY
TEXT AS PROCESS: CREATIVE COMPOSITION IN WORDSWORTH, TENNYSON, AND DICKINSON (Virginia, 2009) xi + 302 pp. 18 illustrations. -RPO-VPO-

This book explores the encounter between verbal and visual forms through a material aesthetic in which perception is shaped by the tangible qualities of the media. The contributors map a new critical approach in which typography and design play an important role as well as the images represented or evoked in the text.
Reviewed by Richard Brantley.

CALE, LUISA AND PATRIZIA DI BELLO
ILLUSTRATIONS, OPTICS AND OBJECTS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERARY AND VISUAL CULTURE (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) xiv + 242 pp. -LVA-

This book explores the encounter between verbal and visual forms through a material aesthetic in which perception is shaped by the tangible qualities of the media. The contributors map a new critical approach in which typography and design play an important role as well as the images represented or evoked in the text.
To be reviewed by Nellickal Jacob.

CASTIGLIA, CHRISTOPHER
INTERIOR STATES: INSTITUTIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE INNER LIFE OF DEMOCRACY IN THE ANTEBELLUM UNITED STATES (Duke, 2009) x + 368 pp. -AL-

First published just three years after Reconstruction officially ended, this classic of American fiction re-creates the struggle to create a just society in the post-slavery South. Karcher sets the novel in its historical context, surveys Tourgee's career, and identifies actual events fictionalized in the novel.
Reviewed by Jeannine DeLombard.

CHASE, KAREN
THE VICTORIANS AND OLD AGE (Oxford, 2009) xiv + 284 pp. -VS-

Recognizing that the Victorians thought of old age as a social category marked by both psychological and physiological features, Karen Chase studies the social and literary conditions that helped construct the experience of old age in the nineteenth century. Treating exemplary texts within relevant cultural episodes, she recreates the drama of the aged struggling for rights and recognition in a world that would have preferred to grant invisibility.
Reviewed by Sarah Bleakney.

COLLEDGE, GARY
DICKENS, CHRISTIANITY AND THE LIFE OF OUR LORD: HUMBLE VENERATION, PROFOUND CONVICTION (Continuum, 2009) x + 183 pp. -LR-VF-

Taking Dickens' The Life of Our Lord as the key to his conception of Christianity, the book shows how that conception informed his fiction, journalism, and letters. Placing Dickens within the context of nineteenth-century popular religion, including Unitarianism, this study also examines his churchmanship and sheds fresh light on Orwell's claim that Dickens "was always preaching a sermon".
Reviewed by Christine Colón.

DE GROOT, JEROME
THE HISTORICAL NOVEL (Routledge, Taylor and Francis, 2009) -REF-VF-

Besides being immensely popular, the historical novel raises fascinating questions about the nature of foundational concepts such as fact and fiction, history, reading and writing. This wide-ranging guide offers an accessible introduction to both the genre and the critical debates around it.
To be reviewed by Harry Shaw.

DENNIS, DONNA
LICENTIOUS GOTHAM: EROTIC PUBLISHING AND ITS PROSECUTION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY NEW YORK (Harvard, 2009) vii + 386 pp., 24 Illustrations -AL-

Examining both the origins of the American pornography industry and the birth of obscenity regulation, this history of indecent print in nineteenth-century New York shows the intimate relation between commerce in pornography and the prosecution of obscenity.
Reviewed by Paul J. Erickson.

DICKSON, LEIGH WETHERALL AND PAUL DOUGLASS, EDS.
THE WORKS OF LADY CAROLINE LAMB (Pickering & Chatto, 2009) Volume 1: Glenarvon: lii + 451; Volume 2: Graham Hamilton and Poems xxx + 229; Volume 3: Ada Reis, A Tale xx + 222. -REF-WW-

This is the first scholarly critical edition of the works of Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828). While her first novel, Glenarvon, fictively re-creates the break-up of her affair with Lord Byron, it also indicts her friends and family as a morally bankrupt and ineffective aristocracy, and her novels as a whole dissect the power structures of her time.
Reviewed by Lindsey Eckert.

DONALDSON, SANDRA, ET AL.
THE WORKS OF ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (Pickering & Chatto, 2009) -VS-WW-

This is the first modern scholarly edition of the works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), a canonical Victorian writer and thinker who took part in debates on Italian unification, women's rights, the anti-slavery movement, factory reform, religion, aesthetics and poetics. This edition lays the foundation for a complete analysis of her works.
To be reviewed by Antony Harrison.

DONOVAN, JULIE
SYDNEY OWENSON, LADY MORGAN, AND THE POLITICS OF STYLE (Academica Press, 2009) -LP-REF-

Contextualizing Owenson's emblematic Irishness, which was often dismissed as excessive showmanship, this study of a major Irish literary figure of the nineteenth century not only examines at length her best-known novel - The Wild Irish Girl (1806) - but also scrutinizes extensively her often-overlooked personal papers and artifacts housed in the National Library of Ireland and the Royal Irish Academy.
To be reviewed by Christopher Nagle.

EGENOLF, SUSAN B.
THE ART OF POLITICAL FICTION IN HAMILTON, EDGEWORTH, AND OWENSON (Ashgate, 2009) ix+209pp. -REF-WW-

Informed by visual culture and a wide range of archival texts, this book explores both gendered and political responses to such key events in the history of Romanticism as the 1798 Irish Rebellion. Egenolf shows how Elizabeth Hamilton, Maria Edgeworth, and Sydney Owenson self-consciously used glosses to facilitate their critiques of politics and society and simultaneously to reveal the process of fictional structuring.
Reviewed by Fiona Price.

EGER, ELIZABETH
BLUESTOCKINGS: WOMEN OF REASON FROM ENLIGHTENMENT TO ROMANTICISM (Palgrave Macmillan, December 2009) -

This study argues that female networks of conversation, correspondence, and patronage formed the foundation for women's work in the "higher" realms of Shakespeare criticism and poetry. While charting the transition between Enlightenment and Romantic culture, Eger stresses the relevance of rational argument in the history of women's writing.
To be reviewed by JoEllen DeLucia.

EISNER, ERIC
NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETRY AND LITERARY CELEBRITY (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) -RPO-VPO-

Arguing that a sophisticated, strategic and fascinated engagement with new modes of fame and new kinds of fandom was central to their experiments with literary form, this book offers new readings of poets ranging from Byron and Keats to Landon and Barrett Browning. Focusing on the exchanges between writers and their passionate readers, this study links the performative operation of language in poetic practice with the array of novel cultural practices through which celebrity is created and sustained.
To be reviewed by Peter Manning.

ELFENBEIN, ANDREW
ROMANTICISM AND THE RISE OF ENGLISH (Stanford 2009) -LL-

Though the history of the English language has virtually disappeared from literary criticism, Elfenbein aims to reconceptualize authorial agency in the light of linguistic history. Seriously assessing the formal and institutional forces that have shaped the production of English, this book not only presents a history of English but also chronicles the major events that have led to the formation of English studies as a coherent discipline.
To be reviewed by James McKusick.

EMERSON, RALPH WALDO
THE COLLECTED WORKS, VOLUME VIII, LETTERS AND SOCIAL AIMS (Harvard, Fall 2009) -AL-

Introduced by Ronald Bosco, this final volume of essay-lectures published in Emerson's lifetime has been edited by Glen M. Johnson and Joel Myerson.
To be reviewed by Laura Walls.

EVANGELISTA, STEFANO-MARIA
BRITISH AESTHETICISM AND ANCIENT GREECE (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) -VS-

This book is the first comprehensive study of the reception of classical Greece among English aesthetic writers of the nineteenth century. By exploring this history of reception, the book aims to furnish a new and fuller understanding of literary aestheticism, its intellectual contexts, and its challenges to mainstream Victorian culture.
To be reviewed by Gillen D'Arcy Wood.

FERRIS, INA AND PAUL KERN, EDS.
BOOKISH HISTORIES: BOOKS, LITERATURE, AND COMMERCIAL MODERNITY (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) -

This collection of essays on "bookish" literary history situates questions about books at the intersection of a range of debates about the role of authors and readers, the organization of knowledge, the vogue for collecting, and the impact of overlapping technologies of writing and shifting generic boundaries.
To be reviewed by Alistair McCleery.

FISKE, SHANYN
HERETICAL HELLENISM: WOMEN WRITERS, ANCIENT GREECE, AND THE VICTORIAN POPULAR IMAGINATION (Ohio, 2009) ix + 262 pp. -VS-WW-

Though Victorian discourse about ancient Greece seems to focus exclusively on male domains, Fiske shows how women writers such as Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot heretically challenged traditional assumptions about the uniformity of classical knowledge. Refracted through popular sources and reconceived through new fields of study, the ineffability of the Greek world appealed to their imaginations.
Reviewed by Noah Comet.

FLEGEL, MONICA
CONCEPTUALIZING CRUELTY TO CHILDREN IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND-LITERATURE, REPRESENTATION, AND THE NSPCC (Ashgate, 2009) i-vi + 208 pp. -CH-VF-VS-

Considering a wide range of texts by authors such as Locke, Rousseau, Caroline Norton, Henry Mayhew, Frances Trollope, and Charles Dickens, Monica Flegel provides an interpretive framework for understanding the formation of child cruelty popularized by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
Reviewed by Meg Norcia.

FRANK, LAWRENCE
VICTORIAN DETECTIVE FICTION AND THE NATURE OF EVIDENCE: THE SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATIONS OF POE, DICKENS, AND DOYLE (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) -AL-VF-VS-

Frank investigates an intertextual exchange between nineteenth-century historical disciplines (philology, cosmology, geology archaeology and Darwin's theories of evolutionary biology) and the detective fictions of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle.
To be reviewed by Paul Grimstad.

FREY, ANNE
BRITISH STATE ROMANTICISM: AUTHORSHIP, AGENCY, AND BUREAUCRATIC NATIONALISM (Stanford, 2009). -LP-

Contesting the notion that British Romantics were imaginative geniuses largely isolated from politics, Frey shows how Wordsworth, Coleridge, Austen, Scott, and De Quincey portray specific state and imperial agencies. In so doing, she argues, they debate what constituted government power, how government penetrated individual lives, and how ordinary citizens could assume governmental authority. Also, she contends, these writers rework Romantic structures such as the imagination, organic form, and the literary sublime to operate through state agencies and to convey membership in a nation.
To be reviewed by Andrew McCann.

FROMER, JULIE E.
A NECESSARY LUXURY: TEA IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND (Ohio, 2008) xi + 375 pp. -VS-

Analyzing tea histories, advertisements, and nine Victorian novels, including Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Wuthering Heights, and Portrait of a Lady. Fromer shows how tea serves as an arbiter of taste and middle-class respectability, and how it helps to determine status and moral position. In Victorian ideology, she argues, the ritual of tea binds social identity and character.
Reviewed by Amy Robinson.

GABRIELE, ALBERTO
READING POPULAR CULTURE IN VICTORIAN PRINT: BELGRAVIA AND SENSATIONALISM (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) xvi + 275 pp. -VS-

As the tension between the title and the subtitle of his book suggests, Gabriele Alberto Gabrieles Reading Popular Culture and Victorian Print: Belgravia and Sensationalism is torn between two competing projects: a study of a very broad theme emerging out of the complex and daunting terrain of Victorian publishing, and a study of a more refined theme in the periodical called Belgravia. It is probably impossible to reconcile two such different projects within a single work, and Gabrieles book, while producing some interesting insights, is not able to bridge the gap.
Reviewed by Nikki Hessell.

GARCHA, AMANPAL
FROM SKETCH TO NOVEL: THE DEVELOPMENT OF VICTORIAN FICTION (Cambridge 2009) -VF-

Thackeray, Dickens, and Gaskell all began their writing careers with literary sketches, adopting a popular short form that stressed description and essayistic analysis over storytelling. This study of a previously neglected literary form shows how the literary sketch influenced these authors' careers, transformed the marketplace for fiction, and led to the development of key formal and ideological elements in the Victorian novel.
To be reviewed by John Sutherland.

GILMORE, PAUL
AESTHETIC MATERIALISM: ELECTRICITY AND AMERICAN ROMANTICISM (Stanford, 2009) -AL-

In response to scientific and technological developments, especially the telegraph, writers such as Whitman, Melville, and Douglass drew on images of electricity and telegraphy to describe literature as both the product of specific economic and social conditions and a means of transcending the individual determined by such conditions. Joining historical and cultural analysis with close textual reading, this book shows how aesthetic influence and material experience together shaped American literature
To be reviewed by Eric Wilson.

GODFREY, ESTHER
THE JANUARY-MAY MARRIAGE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE (Palgrave Macmillan 2009). i-xii + 256 pages. -VF-VS-

By considering the disruptive potential of age disparate marriages in nineteenth- century British literature, Godfrey offers provocative new readings of canonical texts including Don Juan, Jane Eyre, and Bleak House.
Reviewed by Deborah Morse.

GOODING-WILLIAMS, ROBERT
IN THE SHADOW OF DU BOIS: AFRO-MODERN POLITICAL THOUGHT IN AMERICA (Harvard University Press, Fall 2009) -AL-

This study centers on Du Bois's effort to answer the question "What kind of politics should African Americans conduct to counter white supremacy?"
To be reviewed by Martin Favor.

GRAY, ERIK
MILTON AND THE VICTORIANS (Cornell, 2009) xii + 183 pp. -VPO-

Though Victorian writers rarely display the overt, self-conscious engagement with Milton that typified so much Romantic writing earlier in the nineteenth century. Erik Gray shows that Milton's influence pervades the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, Alfred Tennyson, and George Eliot.
Reviewed by Stefanie Markovits.

GRAY, F. ELIZABETH
CHRISTIAN AND LYRIC TRADITION IN VICTORIAN WOMENS POETRY (Routledge, 2009) -LR-RPO-

Ranging from well-known poets to obscure ones, Gray shows how Victorian women reproduced and recreated traditional Christian texts in their own poetic texts, and also how they redeployed the discourse of Christianity to uncover the multiple voices of the scriptures, to expand identity and gender constructions, and to question traditional narratives and processes of authorization. In so doing, Gray argues, women made religious poetry unexpectedly liberating.
To be reviewed by Elizabeth Ludlow.

GUBAR, MARAH
ARTFUL DODGERS: RECONCEIVING THE GOLDEN AGE OF CHILDREN'S LITERATURE (Oxford, 2009) xiv + 264 pp. -CH-VF-

Though Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and J. M.Barrie are traditionally criticized for arresting the child in a position of iconic innocence, Gubar argues that they rejected this pure "child of Nature" paradigm to present children as artfully collaborating with adults in the shaping of their own stories.
Reviewed by James Eli Adams.

HEINRICH, ANSELM, KATHERINE NEWEY AND JEFFREY RICHARDS, EDS.
RUSKIN, THE THEATRE AND VICTORIAN VISUAL CULTURE (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) xiv + 242 pp. -DR-LVA-VS-

This collection of essays sets out to challenge the dominant narrative about Victorian theatre by linking its practices and products to Victorian visual culture and also by applying the concept of "Ruskinian theatre," which values the stage for its educative purpose as well as for its aesthetic expression.
Reviewed by Martin Meisel.

HYMAN, GWEN
MAKING A MAN: GENTLEMANLY APPETITES IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY BRITISH NOVEL (Ohio, 2009) viii + 309 pp. -REF-VF-

Gwen Hyman argues that appetite is a crucial means of casting light on the elusive identity of the gentleman, a figure who embodies power and yet is hardly embodied in Victorian literature. To show what makes a man in novels such as Jane Austen's Emma and Bram Stoker's Dracula. Hyman examines the consumption of food, drink, and drugs in the conspicuously consuming nineteenth century.
Reviewed by Pamela Gilbert.

IVORY, YVONNE
HOMOSEXUAL REVIVAL OF RENAISSANCE STYLE, 1850-1930 (Palgrave US, 2009) -QS-

Why were so many late-nineteenth-century homosexuals passionate about the Italian Renaissance? This book shows how the Victorian coupling of criminality with self-fashioning under the sign of the Renaissance gave queer intellectuals an enduring model of ruthlessly permissive individualism.
To be reviewed by Laurence Davies.

JACKSON, TONY E.
THE TECHNOLOGY OF THE NOVEL: WRITING AND NARRATIVE IN BRITISH FICTION (Johns Hopkins, 2009) ix + 234 pp -VF-

The connection between speech and writing in human language has been a matter of philosophical debate since antiquity. By plumbing the depths of this complex relationship, Jackson explains how the technology of alphabetic writing has determined the nature of the modern novel.
Reviewed by Laura M. White.

JENKINS, GERAINT H., ED.
A RATTLESKULL GENIUS. THE MANY FACES OF IOLO MORGANWG (Cardiff: University of Wales, 2009 paperback, first published 2005) pp. xviii + 515. -LP-RPO-

An industrious academic and charmingly eccentric Romantic poet and forger, Iolo Morganwg (1747-1826) at his death bed left behind a floor-to-ceiling stack of unpublished manuscripts in his small Welsh cottage. This volume, based on that trove of unpublished material, provides both a celebration and a critical reassessment of the author and his contributions to the Welsh cultural tradition.
Reviewed by Kenneth Johnston.

JOHNSON, CLAUDIA L. AND CLARA TUITE
COMPANION TO JANE AUSTEN (Blackwell/ Wiley, 2009) -REF-

Focussing on changing contexts and cultures of reception, this collection of essays by forty-two literary critics and Austen scholars provides a comprehensive survey of contemporary Austen studies while covering the full breadth of the novelist's work and career.
To be reviewed by Sarah Frantz.

JOLLY, ROSLYN
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON IN THE PACIFIC: TRAVEL, EMPIRE AND THE AUTHOR'S PROFESSION (Ashgate, 2009) x + 193 pp. -VS-

Roslyn Jolly examines a crucial period (1887-1894) in Stevenson's life, when the expansion of his geographical and cultural horizons enlarged his professional sphere and led to the self-transformation wrought in his Pacific travel-writing and political texts. Jolly also shows how Victorian readers resisted not only the Pacific subject matter of Stevenson's later works but also his experiments with new styles and genres.
Reviewed by John Lyon.

JONES, COLIN, JOSEPHINE MCDONAGH AND JON MEE
CHARLES DICKENS, A TALE OF TWO CITIES AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION (Palgrave US, 2009) xi + 212 pp. -LP-VF-

Using a variety of disciplinary approaches, this new collection of essays examines the origins of Dickens vision of the French Revolution in Tale of Two Cities, the literary power of the text itself, and its enduring place in British culture through stage and screen adaptations.
Reviewed by Laurence Davies.

KLANCHER, JON
CONCISE COMPANION TO THE ROMANTIC AGE (Blackwell/ Wiley, 2009) xi + 300 pp. -REF-REPR-RPO-

Through a series of original, multi-disciplinary essays, A Concise Companion to the Romantic Age provides new perspectives on the relationships between literature and culture in Britain from 1780 to 1830, exploring the diverse issues and debates of the Romantic era, treating it both aesthetically and as a transformational historical epoch that ushered in Britain's modern industrialized society.
Reviewed by Richard Matlak.

KOPLEY, RICHARD
EDGAR ALLAN POE AND THE DUPIN MYSTERIES (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) i-x + 262 pp. -AL-

Using the methods of Poe's sleuth C. Auguste Dupin, Kopley makes surprising discoveries about Poe's detective tales and traces the origins of the modern detective tale genre.
Reviewed by Louis Renza.

KRAWCZYK, SCOTT
ROMANTIC LITERARY FAMILIES (Palgrave US, 2009) xvii + 224 pp. -REF-

This study traces the conflict and cooperation that developed within and among literary families as they sought to leave their legacies in the English world of letters from 1760-1820.
Reviewed by Felicity James.

KRISHNAMURTHY, ARUNA, ED.
THE WORKING-CLASS INTELLECTUAL IN EIGHTEENTH- AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN (Ashgate, 2009), pp. x + 257 -LP-

This collection of essays tracks the formation of working-class identity through the rise of the "working-class intellectual," a unique cultural figure at the crossroads of two disparate worlds. Contributors cover a range of familiar and unfamiliar figures from the 1730s to the 1850s, shedding light on key moments of working-class self-expression.
Reviewed by Cassandra Falke.

LAFFRADO, LAURA
UNCOMMON WOMEN: GENDER AND REPRESENTATION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY U.S. WOMEN'S WRITING (Ohio State, 2009) -AL-

Scrutinizing self-representation and female agency, this book treats the generic forms, language, and illustrations of books such Sarah Kemble Knight's unconventional travel Journal (1825), Fanny Fern's controversial newspaper essays (1851-72), Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches (1863), Emma Edmonds's Nurse and Spy in the Union Army (1865), and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861).
To be reviewed by Susan Scheckel.

LARSON, KERRY
IMAGINING EQUALITY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE (Cambridge 2009) viii + 212 pp -AL-WW-

Unlike previous studies of slavery, women's writing, and working-class activism in nineteenth-century American literature, this book treats equality not as an endangered ideal but as an imagined social reality in its own right--one with far-reaching consequences. Larson tests Tocqueville's theories of equality against a broad array of genres and pre-Civil war authors including Stowe, Hawthorne, Douglass and Alcott.
Reviewed by Andrea Stone.

LAU, BETH, ED.
FELLOW ROMANTICS: MALE AND FEMALE BRITISH WRITERS, 1790-1835 (Ashgate, 2009) xi + 266 pp. -REF-REPR-RPO-WW-

Treating men and women of the Romantic period as lively interlocutors who participated in many of the same literary traditions and experiments, this book links--among others--Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth, Felicia Hemans and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Contributors defamiliarize the work of both male and female writers by drawing our attention to frequently neglected aspects of each writer's art.
Reviewed by Stephen C. Behrendt.

LEDBETTER, KATHRYN
BRITISH VICTORIAN WOMEN'S PERIODICALS: BEAUTY, CIVILIZATION, POETRY (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) xiii + 236 pp. -VS-WW-

To advance our understanding of women's lives in the nineteenth century, Ledbetter explores themes and patterns of poetry in a variety of women's periodicals published throughout the Victorian era.
Reviewed by Kimberly J. Stern.

LEVIN, JOANNA
BOHEMIA IN AMERICA, 1858-1920 (Stanford, 2009). -AL-

Starting in the 1850s, when la vie bohème traveled to the United States from the Parisian Latin Quarter, this book explores the emergence of "Bohemia" in American literature and culture as a literary trope, a cultural nexus, and a socio-economic landscape. Charting its progress through restaurants, clubs, neighborhoods, novels, poems, and dramatic performances across the country, Levin tracks it up to its explosion in Greenwich Village in the 1910s.
To be reviewed by .

LIDDLE, DALLAS
THE DYNAMICS OF GENRE: JOURNALISM AND THE PRACTICE OF LITERATURE IN MID-VICTORIAN BRITAIN (Virginia, 2009), x + 234 pp. -VS-

Joining Bakhtin's dialogic approach to methods drawn from various other sources including history of the book, this book examines the relationship between mid-Victorian journalistic genres and contemporary poetry, the novel, and serious expository prose. Arguing that periodical genres competed both ideologically and economically with literary genres, Liddle shows how this competition influenced the midcentury writings and careers of authors such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Harriet Martineau, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot.
Reviewed by Laurel Brake.

LOUIS, MARGOT K.
PERSEPHONE RISES, 1860-1927: MYTHOGRAPHY, GENDER, AND THE CREATION OF A NEW SPIRITUALITY (Ashgate, 2009) xvi + 171 pp. -AL-VS-

Showing how controversies over gender, values, and religion inform the study of ancient spirituality, Louis traces the rapid evolution of Persephone from decorative metaphor to the embodiment of a new spirituality, and from her origin in ancient myth through the poetry and prose of the Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist periods.
Reviewed by Andrew Radford.

MALTON, SARA
FORGERY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE: FICTIONS OF FINANCE FROM DICKENS TO WILDE (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) x + 187 pp. -VS-

Malton examines the literary and cultural representation of the financial crime of forgery from the time of massive executions of forgers during the early nineteenth century to the forger's emergence as the ultimate criminal aesthete at the fin-de-siècle.

Reviewed by Leeann D. Hunter.

MARKWICK, MARGARET, DEBORAH DENENHOLZ MORSE AND REGENIA GAGNIER , EDS.
THE POLITICS OF GENDER IN ANTHONY TROLLOPE'S NOVELS (Ashgate, 2009) xiii + 259 pp. -VF-

This collection of essays by established critics and new ones shows how Trollope's fiction lays the ground for theoretical explorations of Victorian culture. Contributors link his fiction to economics, ethnic and colonial studies, gender studies, new historicism, liberalism, legal studies, and politics.
Reviewed by N. John Hall.

MARSH, NICHOLAS
MARY SHELLEY: FRANKENSTEIN (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) xi + 260 pp. -REF-

This study of Frankenstein shows how the story is told and what makes it so gripping. Part I uses carefully selected short extracts for close textual analysis; Part II examines Shelley's life, the historical and literary contexts of the novel, and offers a sample of key criticism.
Reviewed by D. L. Macdonald.

MARSHALL, GAIL
SHAKESPEARE AND VICTORIAN WOMEN (Cambridge, 2009) -VS-WW-

This book studies the actresses who played an essential part in redeeming Shakespeare for the Victorian stage, the writers who made him a part of their own writing as well as their personal lives, and the readers who--attuned to Shakespeare's female voices--often re-read him for their own ends. Treating women as fundamental to the life of Shakespeare in the Victorian era, Marshall argues that what they did with his work could best be called translation.
To be reviewed by Christopher Decker.

MAXWELL, RICHARD
THE HISTORICAL NOVEL IN EUROPE, 1650-1950 (Cambridge, 2009) -AL-REF-

Highlighting both the French invention of historical fiction in the seventeenth century and the re-invention of it in Romantic Scotland, Maxwell shows how these two events led the way to its broad popularity during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Europe as well as in the Americas, the historical novel became as much a way of reading and a set of expectations as a memorable collection of books.
To be reviewed by Harry Shaw.

MILDER, ROBERT AND RANDALL FULLER, EDS.
THE BUSINESS OF REFLECTION: HAWTHORNE IN HIS NOTEBOOKS (Ohio State, 2009) x + 268 pp. -AL-

In this scholarly, annotated selection of Hawthorne's American Notebooks, English Notebooks, and French and Italian Notebooks, Milder and Fuller show how much they reveal about the genesis of his fiction, his psychological and vocational development, his marriage to Sophia Peabody, and his relationships with contemporaries such as Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, and Margarat Fuller.
Reviewed by Laura Dassow Walls.

MILLER, MONICA L.
SLAVES TO FASHION: BLACK DANDYISM AND THE STYLING OF BLACK DIASPORIC IDENTITY (Duke, 2009) -AL-

Tracing the cultural history of the black dandy from his emergence in Enlightenment England to his re-incarnation in the cosmopolitan art worlds of modern-day London and New York, Miller shows how black people used the dandys signature toolsclothing, gesture, and witto break down limiting identity markers and propose new ways of fashioning political and social possibility in the black Atlantic world. She also links the black dandy to nineteenth-century American literature and drama, W. E. B. Du Boiss reflections on black masculinity and cultural nationalism, the modernist aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance, and representations of black cosmopolitanism in contemporary visual art.
To be reviewed by Martin Favor.

MOLE, TOM, ED.
ROMANTICISM AND CELEBRITY CULTURE, 1750-1850 (Cambridge, 2009) -LVA-RPO-VPO-

Arguing that a distinctively modern kind of celebrity originates in the Romantic period, contributors to this volume show that from the beginning it was a multi-media phenomenon whose cultural pervasiveness -- in literature and the theatre, music and visual culture, fashion and boxing -- overflows disciplinary boundaries. Looking back to the 1720s and forward to the 1890s, this volume identifies the people and institutions that made the Romantic period a pivotal moment in the creation of celebrity.
To be reviewed by Peter Manning.

NEWEY, KATE AND JEFFREY RICHARDS
JOHN RUSKIN AND THE VICTORIAN THEATRE (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) -DR-VS-

This book on Ruskin's involvement with the theatre of his time offers a new view of the late Victorian stage, especially the west end, by viewing it through the lens of his writing on pantomime, melodrama, Shakespearean tragedy, and painting.
To be reviewed by Martin Meisel.

NINKOVICH, FRANK
GLOBAL DAWN: THE CULTURAL FOUNDATION OF AMERICAN INTERNATIONALISM, 1865-1890 (Harvard, 2009) -AL-

A rich empirical study that traces how elite American writers and thinkers of the late nineteenth century acquired information about and understood international issues as they wrestled with America's newfound power on the global stage.
To be reviewed by Stephen Shapiro.

PERRY, DENNIS AND CARL SEDERHOLM
POE, "THE HOUSE OF USHER," AND THE AMERICAN GOTHIC (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) -AL-

Probing the links between Poe's tale and the modern horror genre, this book shows how Poe's work still illuminates the deepest and most primitive recesses of the human mind and heart.
To be reviewed by Jerrold Hogle.

PETERSON, LINDA H.
BECOMING A WOMAN OF LETTERS: MYTHS OF AUTHORSHIP AND FACTS OF THE VICTORIAN MARKET (Princeton, 2009) -VS-WW-

How did English women enter the literary profession; meet the demands of editors, publishers, booksellers, and reviewers, and achieve distinction as "women of letters"? This book shows how women writers made their way in the marketplace of authorship and examines the myths and models they constructed to elevate their place in the profession.
To be reviewed by Katherine D. Harris.

POSNER, RICHARD A.
LAW AND LITERATURE 3RD EDITION (Harvard, 2009) -AL-VF-

In this third edition of a book first published over twenty years ago, Posner treats the portrayal of law in the fiction of Conan Doyle, Dickens, Melville, and Twain, and also weighs the argument that literature can sharpen the moral sense of lawyers and judges.
Reviewed by Robert F. Barsky.

PRICE, FIONA
REVOLUTIONS IN TASTE 1773-1818-WOMEN WRITERS AND THE AESTHETICS OF ROMANTICISM (Ashgate, 2009) -REPR-WW-

Re-assessing the aesthetic and political significance of writers such as Joanna Baillie, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Frances Burney, Price shows that they not only shaped and informed the aesthetics of Romanticism but did so by using undervalued genres such as the romance and gothic novel.
To be reviewed by Stephen C. Behrendt.

RICHARD, CARL J.
THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE CLASSICS IN AMERICA: GREECE, ROME, AND THE ANTEBELLUM UNITED STATES (Harvard, 2009) xiii + 258 pp. -AL-

Richard treats the antebellum period as a "golden age" for classics, when reading and teaching them spread beyond the elite. In a growingly democratized society, he contends, the classics served as models for behavior, social practice, and government standards.
Reviewed by James Tatum.

RICHARDS, PAGE
DISTANCING ENGLISH: A CHAPTER IN THE HISTORY OF THE INEXPRESSIBLE (Ohio State, 2009) i-viii + 178 pp. -AL-

How did fears of cultural inadequacy play out in the English language after American independence and the War of 1812? Inheriting a language from a nation "totally unlike it in almost every relation," as Walter Channing has observed, America struggled to bridge the gap between inadequate words and the inexpressible content of high expectations. Often overlooked, the topos of the inexpressible marks deficiency of "character" on and off the page, initiating strategies of decenteredness that anticipate modernism.
Reviewed by Gavin Jones.

ROBBINS, RUTH
OSCAR WILDE (Continuum, 2009) -DR-VS-

Explaining Wilde's manipulations of genre, setting his life and work in its literary and cultural context, and scrutinizing such feats as his subversion of the autobiographical mode in De Profundis, this introductory book treats not only Wilde's life but also his extensive afterlife in literature, criticism and popular culture.
To be reviewed by Patricia Behrendt.

RUDY, JASON R.
ELECTRIC METERS: VICTORIAN PHYSIOLOGICAL POETICS (Ohio UP, 2009), pp. xiii + 222 pp. -VS-

Linking formal poetic analysis with the history of electrical and physiological sciences, Rudy traces the development of physiological poetics from the Romantic poetess tradition to the works of Alfred Tennyson, the "Spasmodic" poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Algernon Swinburne.
Reviewed by Meredith Martin.

SANDERS, MIKE
THE POETRY OF CHARTISM: AESTHETICS, POLITICS, HISTORY (Cambridge, 2009). ix + 299 pp. -LP-VPO-VS-

Why did the writing and reading of poetry play such an important role in Chartism's struggle to secure fundamental democratic rights? This study of the poetry column of the Northern Star--where more than one thousand poems appeared between 1838 and 1852-- tracks the interplay between politics, aesthetics and history in the aftermath of the Newport Insurrection (1839), during the mass strikes of 1842, and in the year of European Revolutions (1848).

Reviewed by John Plotz.

SANDERS, VALERIE
THE TRAGI-COMEDY OF VICTORIAN FATHERHOOD (Cambridge, 2009) xii + 246 pp. -VF-VS-

Examining Victorian middle-class fatherhood from the fathers' own perspective, Valerie Sanders dismantles the persistent stereotype of the nineteenth-century paterfamilias by focusing on the intimate family lives of influential public men such as Prince Albert, Dickens, and Darwin. Drawing on unpublished journals and letters, Sanders shows how conscientious Victorian fathers invented for themselves a meaningful domestic role.
Reviewed by Eileen Gillooly.

SAUNDERS, CLARE BROOME
WOMEN WRITERS AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY MEDIEVALISM (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009) 230 pp. -VS-WW-

This is the first modern scholarly edition of the works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), a canonical Victorian writer and thinker who took part in debates on Italian unification, women's rights, the anti-slavery movement, factory reform, religion, aesthetics and poetics. This edition lays the foundation for a complete analysis of her works.
Reviewed by Antony H. Harrison.

SCHMITT, CANNON
DARWIN AND THE MEMORY OF THE HUMAN: EVOLUTION, SAVAGES, AND SOUTH AMERICA (Cambridge, 2009) xii + 243 pp. -VS-

Taking off from the young Charles Darwin's first encounter with what he called "an untamed savage" on the shores of Tierra del Fuego in 1832, Schmitt shows how Darwin and other Victorian naturalists transformed such encounters into influential accounts of biological and historical change. Schmitt reshapes our understanding of Victorian imperialism, revisits the implications of Darwinian theory, and demonstrates the pertinence of nineteenth-century biological thought to current theorizations of memory.
Reviewed by George Levine.

SCHOENFIELD, MARK
BRITISH PERIODICALS AND ROMANTIC IDENTITY: THE LITERARY "LOWER EMPIRE" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) viii + 296 pp. -

This study explores the rise of periodicals as hugely popular repositories of 'public opinion' in the nineteenth century and the key individuals who shaped their own identities through them.
Reviewed by Nikki Hessell.

SHA, RICHARD C.
PERVERSE ROMANTICISM: AESTHETICS AND SEXUALITY IN BRITAIN, 1750-1832 (Johns Hopkins, 2009) xi + 359 pp. -LSX-RPO-

Sha explains how science shaped notions of sexuality, reproduction, and gender in the Romantic period.
Reviewed by Michael Page.

SMITH, CALEB
THE PRISON AND THE AMERICAN IMAGINATION (Yale, 2009) -

Exploring legal, political, and literary texts including the works of Dickinson, Melville, and Emerson Smith shows how alienation and self-reliance, social death and spiritual rebirth, torture and penitence came together in the prison, a scene for the portrayal of both gothic nightmares and romantic dreams.
To be reviewed by Donald Pease.

STELZIG, EUGENE, ED.
ROMANTIC AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN ENGLAND (Ashgate, 2009) -REPR-RPO-

Surveying a wide range of autobiographical modes in the Romantic period, contributors to this volume treat major writers such as Wordsworth, De Quincey, and Mary Shelley and recent additions to the canon such as Mary Robinson, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary Hays.
To be reviewed by James O'Rourke.

STEWART, GARRETT
NOVEL VIOLENCE: A NARRATOGRAPHY OF VICTORIAN FICTION (Chicago, 2009) 268 pp. -VF-

Immersing himself in the troubling plots of Charles Dickens, Anne Bronte, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, Stewart traces the microplots of language as they unfold syllable by syllable. By showing just where these linguistic narratives collide with the stories that give them context, he makes a powerful case for the centrality of verbal conflict to the experience of reading Victorian novels.
Reviewed by Andrew Bennett.

STRAUB, JULIA
A VICTORIAN MUSE: THE AFTERLIFE OF DANTE'S BEATRICE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE (Continuum, 2009) -LVA-VS-

Focusing chiefly on literature but also treating visual art, this book shows what Dante's heroine becomes in the work of figures such as Tennyson, Ruskin, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and George Eliot. According to Straub, the various representations of Beatrice in literature and in visual art dramatize aesthetic debates and reflect the formation of gender ideals in the Victorian period.
To be reviewed by J. Barrie Bullen.

THORNTON, SARA
ADVERTISING, SUBJECTIVITY AND THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL: DICKENS, BALZAC, AND THE LANGUAGE OF THE WALLS (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), xi + 214 pp. -VF-

Reading "the language of the walls," this book tracks the influence of advertising on the production and consumption of fiction from 1830-70. Reconstructing the origin of a "virtual" world, it theorizes and historicizes a crucial moment in print culture and proposes new readings of key texts by Dickens and Balzac.
Reviewed by Nicholas Mason.

TOURGéE, ALBION W.
BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW: A NOVEL , edited by Carolyn Karcher (Duke, 2009) -AL-

First published just three years after Reconstruction officially ended, this classic of American fiction re-creates the struggle to create a just society in the post-slavery South. Karcher sets the novel in its historical context, surveys Tourgee's career, and identifies actual events fictionalized in the novel.
To be reviewed by Jeannine DeLombard.

TRACY, THOMAS
IRISHNESS AND WOMANHOOD IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH WRITING (Ashgate, 2009) vii + 196 pp. -REF-WW-

Taking off from Lady Morgan's Wild Irish Girl, Tracy argues that nineteenth-century debates over British national identity often revolved around representations of Irishness, especially Irish womanhood. From Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent through Trollope's Irish novels, he maps the genealogy of this development in fiction, political discourse, and the popular press.
Reviewed by Mary Jean Corbett.

UHLIG, STEFAN AND ALEXANDER REGIER, EDS.
WORDSWORTH'S POETIC THEORY (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) -RPO-

Re-examining Wordsworth's theory of poetry in depth, contributors such as Geoffrey Hartman, Frances Ferguson, and Mary Jacobus re-assess its contribution to our understanding of poetic art.
To be reviewed by Leslie Brisman.

UNDERWOOD, DOUG
JOURNALISM AND THE NOVEL: TRUTH AND FICTION, 1700-2000 (Cambridge, 2009) viii + 269 pp. -AL-REF-VF-

Treating journalists-turned-novelists since the early eighteenth century, when the novel and the commercial periodical began to emerge as powerful cultural forces, this book ranges from Daniel Defoe to Charles Dickens, and from Mark Twain to Joan Didion. Underwood shows how many literary reputations are built on reporting, and how it affects realism and authenticity throughout the work of many canonical authors.
Reviewed by Jack Vespa.

VATALARO, PAUL A.
SHELLEY'S MUSIC: FANTASY, AUTHORITY, AND THE OBJECT VOICE (Ashgate, 2009) -RPO-

Taking images of music and allusions to it as evidence that Shelley sought to fuse the power of the masculine word with the mystery of feminine expression, this book argues that Shelley aims to make his voice eternally present in the written word but fails to do so because he cannot vanquish his own desire to preserve male authority.
Reviewed by Stuart Peterfreund.

WALDMAN, SUZANNE B.
THE DEMON AND THE DAMOZEL: DYNAMICS OF DESIRE IN THE WORKS OF CHRISTINA ROSSETTI AND DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI (Ohio, 2009) 211 pp. -LVA-VPO-VS-

Treating Victorian culture as the breeding ground for early theories of the unconscious and the divided psyche, this book offers a new reading of the Rossettis' work. In poems and artworks such as Goblin Market and The Blessed Damozel, Waldman finds adumbrations of narcissism, fetishism, and the symbolic and imaginary orders.
Reviewed by Kathleen O'Neill Sims.

WALKER, ERIC C.
MARRIAGE, WRITING, AND ROMANTICISM: WORDSWORTH AND AUSTEN AFTER WAR (Stanford, 2009) xiv + 283 pp. -REF-RPO-

Like other writers of the Romantic period, Austen and Wordsworth faced the impossibility of writing about anything but marriage and the imperative either to celebrate or condemn it. Working with Austen's fiction, little-known poems by Wordsworth, and theorists ranging from William Godwin to Stanley Cavell, Walker treats marriage as the ground of modern identity.
Reviewed by Beth Lau.

WALLACE, MIRIAM L., ED.
ENLIGHTENING ROMANTICISM, ROMANCING THE ENLIGHTENMENT-BRITISH NOVELS FROM 1750 TO 1832 (Ashgate, 2009) x + 229 pp. -REF-

Rather than simply opposing an Enlightenment of rationality, propriety, and progress to a Romantic Period of inspiration, heroic individualism, and sublime emotionality, these essays reveal a productive tension, challenging traditional definitions of both periods. Patricia Meyer Spacks and Stephen C. Behrendt respond, situating the essays and the stakes.
Reviewed by Tony Jarrells.

WALLACE, MIRIAM L.
REVOLUTIONARY SUBJECTS IN THE ENGLISH 'JACOBIN' NOVEL 1790-1805 (Bucknell, 2009) -

Rather than simply opposing an Enlightenment of rationality, propriety, and progress to a Romantic Period of inspiration, heroic individualism, and sublime emotionality, these essays reveal a productive tension, challenging traditional definitions of both periods. Patricia Meyer Spacks and Stephen C. Behrendt respond, situating the essays and the stakes.
To be reviewed by Tony Jarrells.

WEINBERG, ALAN M. AND TIMOTHY WEBB, EDS.
THE UNFAMILIAR SHELLEY (Ashgate, 2009), pp. xix + 369 pp. -RPO-

Taking full advantage of new editions, notebooks, and previously neglected texts, contributors re-evaluate Shelley's verse letters, plays, satire, pamphlets, prose essays, political verse, romance, prefaces, translations, art representations, fragments and early writings.
Reviewed by Stuart Curran.

WEINGARDEN, LAUREN S.
LOUIS H. SULLIVAN AND A 19TH-CENTURY POETICS OF NATURALIZED ARCHITECTURE (Ashgate, May 2009) -AL-LVA-

Giving equal weight to Sullivan's writings and designs, Weingarden reveals his eloquent articulation of nineteenth-century romantic practices--literary, linguistic, aesthetic, spiritual, and nationalistic. More than a pioneer of twentieth-century modernism, she argues, he exemplifies the peak of nineteenth-century romanticism.
To be reviewed by Robert Twombly.

WHELAN, LAURA
CLASS, CULTURE AND SUBURBAN ANXIETIES IN THE VICTORIAN ERA (Routledge, Taylor and Francis, 2009). 176pp. -VF-VS-

In Victorian Britain, the suburb inspired a literary sub-genre depicting a place where outsiders could be controlled and middle-class values enforced. Reading the discourse of the suburb in order to illuminate a facet of class history that has often been ignored, overgeneralized, or misunderstood, Whelan recontextualizes Victorian fiction for modern readers.
Reviewed by Sarah Bilston.

WHITLA, WILLIAM
VICTORIAN LITERATURE: AN ANTHOLOGY (Blackwell/ Wiley, 2009) -VF-VPO-VS-

Offering poetry, drama, prose fiction, life-writing, and non-fictional prose by 95 canonical and non-canonical writers, this anthology includes the work of many women as well as of working-class, colonial, and gay and lesbian writers.
To be reviewed by Jared Hromadka.

WILSON, CHERYL A.
LITERATURE AND DANCE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN: JANE AUSTEN TO THE NEW WOMAN (Cambridge, 2009) vii + 202 pp. -REF-VF-VS-

Scrutinizing ballroom scenes in the fiction of Austen, Thackeray, Eliot, and Trollope as well as nineteenth-century dance manuals, Cheryl A. Wilson shows how dance prompted social commentary and cultural critique on issues such as gender, social mobility, and nationalism.
Reviewed by Alisa Clapp-Itnyre.

WILSON, KEITH, ED.
A COMPANION TO THOMAS HARDY (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. xiv + 488 -VF-

Through original essays from a distinguished team of international scholars and Hardy specialists, A Companion to Thomas Hardy provides a unique, one-volume resource encompassing all aspects of Hardy's major novels, short stories, and poetry. Groundbreaking insights are revealed through examinations of his novels, short stories, poetry, and the often neglected epic-drama, The Dynasts. The Companion provides an influential re-assessment of Hardy's place in both Victorian and Modern literature.

Reviewed by Kristin Ross.

WILSON, ROB
BE ALWAYS CONVERTING, BE ALWAYS CONVERTED: AN AMERICAN POETICS (Harvard, 2009) -AL-

Diverse sources such as the 19th century missionary link between Hawai'i and Puritan New England inform this exploration of the conversion process in American literature.
To be reviewed by Kyle Roberts.

WOHLGEMUT, ESTHER
ROMANTIC COSMOPOLITANISM (Palgrave Macmillan, November 2009) -

This book shows how cosmopolitanism in the early nineteenth-century offers a non-unified formulation of the nation that contrasts with more unified models such those of Edmund Burke, who found nationality in language, history, geography, and blood.
To be reviewed by Nigel Leask.

YOUNG, PAUL
GLOBALIZATION AND THE GREAT EXHIBITION (Palgrave US, 2009) -VS-

This book examines the Great Exhibition as a decisive moment in the formation of a capitalist world picture. In so doing it foregrounds a vision of peace and progress which took hold of British society, within the Crystal Palace and beyond. It emphasizes too that this Victorian understanding of global order legitimized imperial ambition.
To be reviewed by Barry Qualls.

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