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Katherine Isobel Baxter
JOSEPH CONRAD AND THE SWAN SONG OF ROMANCE
(Ashgate, January 2010)
Reviewed by Linda Dryden
on 2010-07-16.
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Joseph Conrad's novel The Rescue had an unusually long gestation period. Begun in the 1890s, it was abandoned by the author for around 25 years before finally being published in 1920 as the third of a retrospective trilogy featuring Captain Lingard. Since Conrad called it the "swan song of romance,"...
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Paul Gilmore
AESTHETIC MATERIALISM: ELECTRICITY AND AMERICAN ROMANTICISM
(Stanford, 2009)
Reviewed by Jason Rudy
on 2010-07-15.
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For a while in academic circles it seemed naive to have any confidence in aesthetics. That time has now passed. The Radical Aesthetic (2000), Isobel Armstrong's important intervention, addressed the "anti-aesthetic" turn in criticism that followed from "Marxists, cultural materialists, post-structuralists,...
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Susan Walton
Imagining Soldiers and Fathers in the Mid-Voctorian Era: Charlotte Yonge's Moddels of Manliness
(Ashgate, 2010), xiii + 239 pp.
Reviewed by John Reed
on 2010-07-07.
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This well-researched study has a peculiar trajectory. Its overarching aim is to show how, in the middle of the nineteenth century in England, the criterion of ideal masculinity changes from physical prowess to self-restraint. Walton's evidence for this change is convincing. But the focus on Charlotte Yonge has its own...
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Rachel Teukolsky
THE LITERATE EYE: VICTORIAN ART WRITING AND MODERNIST AESTHETICS
(Oxford, 2009)
Reviewed by Elyse Graham
on 2010-06-30.
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Rachel Teukolsky's interesting and valuable book charts the life of formalist aesthetics in British writing about the visual arts in the later nineteenth century--before the famous date on formalism's birth certificate, 1910. The author keeps close to facts and evidence, faithfully maps her local studies onto a larger picture, and supplies abundant leads for further exploration. Oxford University...
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Ronald A. Bosco, Glen M. Johnson and Joel Myerson, eds.
COLLECTED WORKS OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON, VOLUME VIII: LETTERS AND SOCIAL AIMS
(Harvard 2010) cclxxiv + 397 pp.
Reviewed by Laura Dassow Walls
on 2010-06-30.
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Letters and Social Aims, originally published in December 1875, marks the moment when Ralph Waldo Emerson passed into the hands of his heirs and descendants. It was a moment of pathos. Though Emerson himself was still very much alive, and would be for another six and a half years, his mind had already faded so much that, as Ronald Bosco writes, he greeted his new book as "a...
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