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James Watt
BRITISH ORIENTALISMS, 1759-1835
(Cambridge, 2019)
Reviewed by Gillen D'Arcy Wood
on 2019-12-06.
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This excellent book is a pessimistic study, skeptical of liberal narratives past and present. Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) set the terms for postcolonial critique a generation and more ago, but in the last decade and a half, scholarship on West-East relations in the Georgian period has tested a hopeful, revisionist narrative of "colonization-in-reverse" based upon a thesis of increasing...
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Katherine Bergren
THE GLOBAL WORDSWORTH: ROMANTICISM OUT OF PLACE
(Bucknell, 2018) 226 pp.
Reviewed by Nikki Hessell
on 2019-11-13.
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The full title of Katherine Bergren's marvellous book says it all: William Wordsworth is both a profoundly global poet, influential all over the world, and yet also acutely out of place in many of the locales where his poetry landed. Deeply embedded in his local and regional environment, attentive to its flora, fauna, climate, and landscape, Wordsworth seems a particularly odd choice for colonial...
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David O'Shaughnessy, ed.
IRELAND, ENLIGHTENMENT, AND THE ENGLISH STAGE, 1740-1820
(Cambridge, 2019), xvi+268pp.
Reviewed by
on 2019-11-04.
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The British Enlightenment owed a large debt to Ireland. More specifically, as David O'Shaughnessy's impeccably edited collection of essays illustrates, it owed a large debt to the Irish stage. By the "Irish stage" I mean a range of things. I mean the Irish actors and actresses who plied their trade on the main stages of London, enacting there a range of ethnic characters and bringing to English...
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Catherine J. Golden
SERIALS TO GRAPHIC NOVELS: THE EVOLUTION OF THE VICTORIAN ILLUSTRATED BOOK
(Florida, 2017) xviii + 299 pp.
Reviewed by Philip V. Allingham
on 2019-10-17.
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In this book Catherine J. Golden, author of Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing (2010) and Images of the Woman Reader in Victorian British and American Fiction (2003), and editor of Book Illustrated: Text, Image, and Culture, 1770-1930 (2000), charts the principal developments in illustrated fiction from the earliest of the illustrated serials of the...
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Pamela K. Gilbert
SKIN: SURFACE, SELF, HISTORY
(Cornell 2019) xi + 434 pp.
Reviewed by Tabitha Sparks
on 2019-10-08.
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In The Lampshade (2010), journalist Mark Jacobson traces the origin of the titular object, which was purportedly made from the flayed skin of a Jewish victim of the Nazis. When he consults a spiritualist, she intuits the human source of the lampshade and confirms the Holocaust origin story. This utterly changes Jacobson's relationship to the lampshade, which he now sees as a relic of unimaginable...
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