Review 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.

ARONDEKAR, ANJALI
FOR THE RECORD: ON SEXUALITY AND THE COLONIAL ARCHIVE IN INDIA (Duke, 2009) xii + 215 pp. -LP-VS-

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.
Reviewed by Josna E. Rege.

ARTESE, BRIAN
TESTIMONY ON TRIAL: CONRAD, JAMES, AND THE CONTEST FOR MODERNISM (Toronto, January 2012) 208 pp. -AL-VF-

Who is a more authoritative source of information -- an eyewitness or a more "impartial" authority? This book examines the conflicts over testimony through the eyes of two of its major combatants, Joseph Conrad and Henry James. Brian Artese finds an overlooked yet direct inspiration for Heart of Darkness in the anti--testimonial scheming of Henry Morton Stanley and the New York Herald. Through new readings of works including Lord Jim and The Portrait of a Lady, Artese demonstrates how the cultural conditions that worked against testimony fed into a nascent conflict about the meaning of modernism itself.
To be reviewed by Joyce Wexler.

AZZARELLO, ROBERT
QUEER ENVIRONMENTALITY: ECOLOGY, EVOLUTION, AND SEXUALITY IN AMERICAN LITERATURE (Ashgate, May 2012) -AL-QS-

Challenging the idea that environmental literature dramatizes heterosexual teleology, Azzarello shows how environmentalism turns queer in the works of Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Willa Cather, and Djuna Barnes.
Review coming soon.

BAKER, SAMUEL
WRITTEN ON THE WATER: BRITISH ROMANTICISM AND THE MARITIME EMPIRE OF CULTURE (University of Virginia Press, 2010) xix + 320 pp. -RPO-

The very word "culture" has traditionally evoked the land. But when such writers as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and, later, Matthew Arnold developed what would become the idea of modern culture, they modeled that idea on Britain's imperial command of the sea. Samuel Baker tracks an uncanny interrelationship between ocean imagery and a rhetoric of culture forward from the late Augustans to the mid-Victorians.
Reviewed by Richard Lansdown.

BANNET, EVE TAVOR AND SUSAN MANNING, EDS.
TRANSATLANTIC LITERARY STUDIES, 1660-1830 (Cambridge, 31 December 2011) -AL-LL-

In a set of original essays on transatlantic literary exchanges from 1660 to 1830, this book offers both a state-of-the-art report on existing scholarship and a preview of future prospects in this field.
Review coming soon.

BATES, BRIAN R.
WORDSWORTH'S POETIC COLLECTIONS, SUPPLEMENTARY WRITING AND PARODIC RECEPTION (Pickering & Chatto/ Ashgate, June 2012) 256 pp. -RPO-

Wordsworth's process of revision, his organization of poetic volumes and his supplementary writings are often seen as distinct from his poetic composition. Bates asserts that an analysis of these supplementary writings and paratexts are necessary to a full understanding of Wordsworth's poetry. He examines Wordsworth's career between 1800 and 1820 to reveal how supplementary prose, promotion and parody were intertwined with debates on the creation of reading publics, the role of the press and the enduring literary character of England.
To be reviewed by Leslie Brisman.

BAUER, DALE, ED.
THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF AMERICAN WOMEN'S LITERATURE (Cambridge, 31 May 2012) -AL-WW-

This collaborative history develops historical, cultural, theoretical, and even polemical methods of examining the literature created by American women.
Review coming soon.

BENDIXEN, ALFRED, ED.
A COMPANION TO THE AMERICAN NOVEL (Wiley-Blackwell, April 2012) -AL-

Charting the development of the American novel from 1780 to the present day, leading scholars highlight the interaction of cultural forces and aesthetic principles. After considering a broad range of categories including the Gothic, science fiction, and detective writing, they examine key works ranging from The Scarlet Letter to Beloved.
Review coming soon.

BLOOM, ABIGAIL BURNHAM AND MARY SANDERS POLLOCK, EDS.
VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND FILM ADAPTATION (Cambria, November, 2011), pp. 280 -LVA-VF-

Working with a body of literature present at the very creation of film, this book builds on major film theory and also on critical and theoretical work specifically about Victorian film and television adaptations. It probes adaptations of drama, short stories, and poetry as well as novels and lesser known works of the Victorian period, and it studies the work of directors such as Ernst Lubitsch, Stanley Kubrick, Atom Egoyan, and Francis Ford Coppola. Besides the editors, contributors are Thomas Leitch, Jean-Marie Lecomte, Natalie Neill, Gene M. Moore, Michael Eberle-Sinatra, Louise McDonald, Ellen Moody, Sarah J. Heidt, Laura Carroll, Christopher Palmer, Sue Thomas, and Rebecca Waese.
To be reviewed by Kamilla Elliott.

BROWN, DANIEL
THE POETRY OF VICTORIAN SCIENTISTS (Cambridge, October 2012) -LS-VPO-

In this first sustained study of the poetry written by Victorian scientists, Daniel Brown shows the mutual influence of scientific concerns with language, and mathematical notation, on the one hand, and the playful principles of poetry -- especially nonsense poetry -- on the other.
To be reviewed by John Holmes.

BULLEN, J.B.
ROSSETTI: PAINTER AND POET (Frances Lincoln, 2011) -LVA-VPO-

In this first interdisciplinary account of a man who inspired both the first pre-Raphaelite generation of 1849 and the second generation ten years later, Bullen tracks the development of his painting and poetry within the context of his highly dramatic life. By turns sensual and spiritual, Dante Gabriel Rossetti sought to transcend the Manichean division of body and soul even as he struggled with the contradictions of sexuality, projecting onto women his anxieties, pleasures, and needs.
Review coming soon.

CASTRONOVO, RUSS, ED.
THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE (Oxford, January 2012) -AL-

The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth Century American Literature offers a cutting-edge assessment of the period's literature, providing readers with practical insights and proactive strategies for exploring novels, poems, and other literary creations.
Review coming soon.

CHANG, ELIZABETH
BRITAINS CHINESE EYE: LITERATURE, EMPIRE, AND AESTHETICS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN (Stanford, 2010), viii + 238pp. -LP-VS-

Tracing intimate connections between Britain and China throughout the nineteenth century, Chang shows how British writers and artists of this period represented Chinese people, places, and things, and how, in the process, ethnographic, geographic, and aesthetic representations of China shaped Britons vision of their own lives and experiences. Since for many Britons China was not just a place a way of seeing and being, the idea of China's visual difference stood in negative contrast to Britain's evolving sense of the visual and literary real
Reviewed by Gillen Wood.

FRANK, CATHRINE O.
LAW, LITERATURE, AND THE TRANSMISSION OF CULTURE IN ENGLAND 1837-1925 (Ashgate, 2010), viii + 250 pp. -VF-VS-

Starting with the Wills Act of 1837, Frank poses two basic questions: what picture of Victorian culture and personal subjectivity emerges from competing legal and literary narratives about the will, and how does the shift from realist to modernist representations of the will accentuate a growing divergence between law and literature? Ranging from Emily Brontë to E.M. Forster, Frank reveals the rhetorical and cultural significance of the will in law and literature. She also shows while how these competing discourses worked to structure a social order that emphasized self-determinism yet linked individuals to the broader community.
Reviewed by Jane Lee.

IVORY, YVONNE
HOMOSEXUAL REVIVAL OF RENAISSANCE STYLE, 1850-1930 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), ix + 240 pp. -QS-VS-

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.
Reviewed by Laurence Davies.

KRUEGER, CHRISTINE
READING FOR THE LAW: BRITISH LITERARY HISTORY AND GENDER ADVOCACY (Virginia, 2010) xi + 301 pp. -REF-VF-WW-

Taking her title from the British term for legal study, Krueger asks how reading for the law as literary history serves the progressive educational purposes of the Law and Literature movement. Focussing on gender and feminist advocacy in the long nineteenth century, she argues that a multidisciplinary historical narrative jurisprudence strengthens narrative legal theorists claims for the transformative powers of stories by replacing an ahistorical opposition between literature and law with a history of their interdependence, and their embeddedness in print culture.
Reviewed by Robert Barsky.

LEARY, PATRICK
THE PUNCH BROTHERHOOD: TABLE TALK AND PRINT CULTURE IN MID-VICTORIAN LONDON (British Library, 2010) x + 197 pp. -

While scholars such as Richard Altick have shown how fully Punch inhabited Victorian politics and culture, the circumstances of its production have been largely ignored. Working with various documents and letters (published and unpublished) as well as with Henry Silvers manuscript diary of Punch dinner meetings from 1858 to 1870, Leary reconstructs the web of talk, friendship, and ambition that surrounded the magazine and that contributed to the formation of a unique business enterprise and ... working community (p. 6) for the first 50 years of the magazines existence.
Reviewed by Michael Slater.

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.
Review coming soon.

REGIER, ALEXANDER
FRACTURE AND FRAGMENTATION IN BRITISH ROMANTICISM (Cambridge, 2010), ix + 240 pp. -REPR-RPO-

Treating fracture and fragmentation thematically and structurally, Regier explains how they form a lens through which some central concerns of Romanticism--especially its language and thought-- can be analysed in a particularly effective way. Treating fracture and fragmentation thematically and structurally. Treating Wordsworth, Kant, Burke, Keats, and De Quincey, as well as analysing central intellectual presuppositions of the period, he also highlights Romanticism's importance for contemporary scholarship, especially in the writings of Benjamin and de Man.
Reviewed by .

WOLFSON, SUSAN J.
ROMANTIC INTERACTIONS. SOCIAL BEING AND THE TURNS OF LITERARY ACTION (Johns Hopkins, 2010) xv + 381 pp. -VPO-WW-

Ranging from the 178s to the 1840s, this book shows various writers of poetry and prosesome celebrated, some lesser known-- came to shape their work and define themselves as author by interaction with other authors -- whether on the bookshelf, in the embodied company of someone else writing, or in relation to literary celebrity.
Reviewed by Kenneth R. Johnston.

YOUNG, PAUL
GLOBALIZATION AND THE GREAT EXHIBITION (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) x + 249 pp. -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.
Reviewed by Tanya Agathocleous.

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