| |
David Francis Taylor
THE POLITICS OF PARODY: A LITERARY HISTORY OF CARICATURE 1760-1830
(Yale, 2018) xii + 304pp.
Reviewed by Brian Maidment
on 2020-01-15.
|
 |
At one point in this original and sophisticated study of the "literariness" of caricature, David Taylor notes, with a nod to Bourdieu, that "something vitally important gets lost when we read pictures as nothing more or other than language"(43). Despite its presence as a formulation in everyday academic use, what does it actually mean to "read" the language of a graphic image? Is "reading" in this...
Click here to read the full review.
|
|
|
Mary L. Mullen
NOVEL INSTITUTIONS: ANACHRONISM, IRISH NOVELS AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY REALISM
(Edinburgh, 2019) xi + 252 pp.
Reviewed by Patrick R. O'Malley
on 2019-12-31.
|
 |
This book makes a key intervention in both nineteenth-century studies and Irish studies by considering in conjunction with each other British and Irish novels that were written more or less contemporaneously. In many ways this seems an obvious move. We don't think twice about putting Walter Scott in conversation with Jane Austen, or Thomas Carlyle with Charles Dickens, but somehow it seems surprising...
Click here to read the full review.
|
|
|
Melissa Bailes
QUESTIONING NATURE: BRITISH WOMEN'S SCIENTIFIC WRITING AND LITERARY ORIGINALITY, 1750-1830
(Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2017) vii + 263 pp.
Reviewed by Philipp Erchinger
on 2019-12-12.
|
 |
>
It seems fair to say that for quite some time, the work of women writers such as Anna Letitia Barbauld and Charlotte Smith has been moving toward the center of Romantic studies. But given the now well-established literary / historical significance and influence of many of these writers, why were they ever considered marginal? As Melissa Bailes's solidly researched and richly detailed study suggests,...
Click here to read the full review.
|
|
|
James Watt
BRITISH ORIENTALISMS, 1759-1835
(Cambridge, 2019)
Reviewed by Gillen D'Arcy Wood
on 2019-12-06.
|
 |
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...
Click here to read the full review.
|
|
|
Katherine Bergren
THE GLOBAL WORDSWORTH: ROMANTICISM OUT OF PLACE
(Bucknell, 2018) 226 pp.
Reviewed by Nikki Hessell
on 2019-11-13.
|
 |
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...
Click here to read the full review.
|
|
|
|
|
