NBOL-19 Reviews

Regenia Gagnier reviews THE PLEASURES OF BENTHAMISM: VICTORIAN LITERATURE, UTILITY, POLITICAL ECONOMY

2 Feb 2010 20:39:13 GMT

I have been referring students and colleagues to Kathleen Blake's scattered essays and lectures as a corrective to less informed treatments of Bentham and utilitarianism since I first heard Blake speak about Bentham on sex at the "Locating the Victorians: Interdisciplinary Conference for the Sesquicentenary of the Great Exhibition" in London, July 2001. Now her articles and lectures have appeared in the book that makes the strongest case...

Fiona Price reviews THE ART OF POLITICAL FICTION IN HAMILTON, EDGEWORTH, AND OWENSON

2 Feb 2010 20:35:37 GMT

This book sets out to explore the political engagement and artistic skill of three Romantic period women novelists - Elizabeth Hamilton, Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan). Edgeworth and Owenson are of course often considered together because of their participation in the genre of the national tale (although their positions on Ireland are quite different), but here the addition of Hamilton allows suggestive contrasts and similarities in the three writers' treatment of the colonial subject...

Laurence Davies reviews CHARLES DICKENS, A TALE OF TWO CITIES AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

2 Feb 2010 20:32:13 GMT

Almost every page of this collection offers a fresh idea or a piquant reading. Fruits of a conference on Dickens and the French Revolution held in 2006, the contributions are ripe but pleasingly distinct in flavour. The editors rightly observe that the "iconic status" of A Tale of Two Cities "has allowed it to accommodate a great variety of often wildly divergent readings," for example as "a reference point for Franco-British relations, a representation of mob violence, a fable about Christian sacrifice...

Felicity James reviews ROMANTIC LITERARY FAMILIES

26 Jan 2010 00:03:00 GMT

This is a thoughtful, measured, and persuasive book - a real contribution to our understanding of Romantic creativity. Scott Krawczyk's analysis not only taps into recent critical interest in sociable networks and collaborative productions; it also offers new insights into the literary family as the "predominant mediating network for Romantic collaboration" (x). These Romantic literary families - which include the formidable intellectual Aikin clan, those intense orphans William and Dorothy Wordsworth and the Wollstonecraft-Godwin-Shelley circle,...

Nikki Hessell reviews READING POPULAR CULTURE IN VICTORIAN PRINT: BELGRAVIA AND SENSATIONALISM

16 Jan 2010 20:58:11 GMT

As the tension between the title and the subtitle of his book suggests, Gabriele Alberto 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 Gabriele's book, while producing some interesting insights, is not able to bridge the gap.

Sarah Bilston reviews CLASS, CULTURE AND SUBURBAN ANXIETIES IN THE VICTORIAN ERA

16 Jan 2010 20:12:06 GMT

This well-written, historically rich study is a fascinating addition to the growing body of critical work on Victorian suburbia, which includes Annette R. Federico's Idol of Suburbia: Marie Corelli and Late-Victorian Literary Culture (2000), Roger Webster's edited collection Expanding Suburbia: Reviewing Suburban Narratives (2000), Lynne Hapgood's Margins of Desire: The Suburbs in Fiction and Culture, 1880-1925 (2005), and articles by Kate...

Deborah Morse reviews THE JANUARY-MAY MARRIAGE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE

6 Jan 2010 14:56:14 GMT

Esther Godfrey's fine study of the January-May marriage focuses upon Victorian literature, although there are forays into the Romantics. Godfrey is most interested in the "provocative scenarios for theorizing gender and power" (5) that this literary trope offers; she "chose the nineteenth century as the scope of this book because it offers a unique period of gender disruption and anxiety, but the patterns of exchange that its texts reveal can inform...

Sarah Bleakney reviews THE VICTORIANS AND OLD AGE

4 Jan 2010 16:35:27 GMT

This noteworthy book joins a developing body of criticism that examines Victorian conceptions of aging and how the aged are portrayed in literature and the visual arts. Specifically, Chase's work joins two other books on its subject that have appeared this year: Esther Liu Godfrey's, The January-May Marriage in Nineteenth Century British Literature and Kay Heath's Aging...

Tony Jarrells reviews ENLIGHTENING ROMANTICISM, ROMANCING THE ENLIGHTENMENT-BRITISH NOVELS FROM 1750 TO 1832

21 Dec 2009 18:03:52 GMT

Miriam Wallace presents the essays in this collection as a response to a problem that confronts many scholars who work in the fields of eighteenth-century studies and Romanticism: the problem of periodization. All literary historians must deal with it to some extent; but real problems arise with periods like the one, say, between the 1740s (after the deaths of Pope and Swift) and the 1780s (before Blake and Wordsworth start publishing) which are neither one thing (Augustan, eighteenth century) nor another (Romantic). Naming such a period...

Gavin Jones reviews DISTANCING ENGLISH: A CHAPTER IN THE HISTORY OF THE INEXPRESSIBLE

21 Dec 2009 17:34:15 GMT

The English language "is the medium that shall well nigh express the inexpressible, "writes Walt Whitman in his preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass. Whitman's poetic effort to find a language to embody what lies beyond the comprehension of man was at once a religious project-an effort to comprehend divinity on earth-and a national project: to capture the perfectionism that the American experiment implied. In one sense, this book re-examines Whitman's poetic project by placing it within nineteenth-century American history...

George Levine reviews DARWIN AND THE MEMORY OF THE HUMAN: EVOLUTION, SAVAGES, AND SOUTH AMERICA by Cannon Schmitt

3 Dec 2009 08:44:51 GMT

This is a brilliant, original, often difficult, but ultimately satisfying book. It is also very ambitious, for it sets out, by focusing on South America as an object of European travels and voyage narratives, to analyze and indeed reconstruct the construction, or "invention," as Schmitt puts it, of "the human as natural." This is no small task, and it requires of Schmitt the identification of a technique, "mnemotechnics," that gives to the human its distinctiveness: "the human is the animal that remembers it no longer is an animal,...

Stuart Curran reviews THE UNFAMILIAR SHELLEY edited by Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb

1 Dec 2009 05:18:43 GMT

Michael Bradshaw concludes the opening paragraph of the first essay in The Unfamiliar Shelley by claiming that "the isolation of the reader before" one of Shelley's fragmentary wisps of verse "is unusually bracing" ([21]). That seems an apt phrase for the entire enterprise of this volume, though one ought, in truth, to report that some of its essays are actually on the level of the exhilarating. This is because, as the learned and ranging preface emphasizes, the project of publishing the 23 volumes of Shelley notebooks...

Stuart Curran reviews PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY by Stephen C. Behrendt, ed.

1 Dec 2009 05:18:40 GMT

Stephen Behrendt's selection of Shelley for the Longman Cultural Editions takes advantage of the determination of that series of textbooks to fill out the contexts within which an author's major writings subsist. It also enlarges the category of the familiar, particularly in the realm of Shelley's political writings, which are emphasized throughout. For instance, his rhetorically powerful "Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte" (1817) with its daring slipping to a dirge for Liberty at the end, is juxtaposed with a fawning newspaper tribute to her and accounts of the public...

Stuart Peterfreund reviews SHELLEY'S MUSIC: FANTASY, AUTHORITY, AND THE OBJECT VOICE by Paul A. Vatalaro

1 Dec 2009 05:18:38 GMT

This book begins with something like a thunderbolt. In a pre-emptive coup de foudre by means of which he aims to sunder his project from nearly all of what has gone before in recent Shelley studies, Paul A. Vatalaro spurns what he calls "an exclusively historicist approach to the relevant topics of voice and music in Shelley's writing. . . ." Such an approach, he claims, manifests an "inability to regard jouissance,...

Steve Behrendt reviews FELLOW ROMANTICS: MALE AND FEMALE BRITISH WRITERS, 1790-1835 by Beth Lau

1 Dec 2009 05:18:36 GMT

More than two decades ago Stuart Curran's landmark essay, "The I Altered," appeared in Anne Mellor's 1988 essay collection, Romanticism and Feminism, which itself followed by two years Poetic Form and British Romanticism...

Meg Norcia reviews CONCEPTUALIZING CRUELTY TO CHILDREN IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND-LITERATURE, REPRESENTATION, AND THE NSPCC by Monica Flegel

1 Dec 2009 05:18:33 GMT

Flegel's text is part of the Ashgate Studies in Childhood series edited by Claudia Nelson that includes Dennis Denisoff's edited collection The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture and Mary Hilton's Women and the Shaping of the Nation's Young: Education and Public Doctrine in Britain 1750-1850. These books examine childhood in relation to topics such as gender, education, and consumerism. In a larger sense, Flegel's text participates in a...