Favorite historical fiction: William Golding, The Spire; Benjamin Myers, Beastings; Benjamin Myers, Cuddy; Kate Atkinson, Shrines of Gaiety; Fred D'Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts; Hernan Diaz, In the Distance.  

Favorite neo-Victorian mashup: Adam Roberts, The Death of Sir Martin Marprelate.

Favorite political allegory: Raphaela Edelbauer (trans. Jen Calleja), The Liquid Land.  

Favorite biofiction: Karen Powell, Fifteen Wild Decembers.  

Only religious memoir with an autopsy report included?: William Carus Wilson, Memoir of a Beloved and Long-Afflicted Sister.

Best horror-cum-social satire: Joan Samson, The Auctioneer.  

Novel eliciting the most "wait, what did I just read" reaction: Brendan Connell, The Translation of Father Torturo.

Victorian ghost stories I'm always happy to reread: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, "At Chrighton Abbey"; Elizabeth Gaskell, "The Old Nurse's Story."

Most Gothic biography: Daphne du Maurier, The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte.   

Favorite little-known psychological horror novel: Frank Baker, The Twisted Tree.   

Trend that I hope is coming to a close: Sherlock Holmes mashed up with Lovecraft.  

Mystery series I thought couldn't get any more lugubrious, and yet, it did: John Banville's Quirke (no longer published under the Benjamin Black pseudonym?).

Novels with endings that made me say "...really?!": Maggie O'Farrell, The Marriage Portrait; Elizabeth Hand, A Haunting on the Hill.  

Most unusual horror collection: Brian Evenson, The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell.

Favorite horror anthology: Joyce Carol Oates, ed., A Darker Shade of Noir.  

Most competent long poem by Branwell Bronte?: "Sir Henry Tunstall."

Most competent Victorian religious novelist: Emma Jane Worboise.  

Most cheerful Victorian religious novel: J. W. Keyworth,  Willie's Secret. 

Best friend (well, arguably) of a famous novelist with the worst handwriting: Ellen Nussey.  

Victorian clergyman-diarist least willing to take a stand on anything: Henry Nussey.  You would think that the man could at least have an opinion about witnessing people speaking in tongues, but apparently not.  

Grimmest experience reading nineteenth-century correspondence: a tie between Thomas J. Wise making off with chunks of Ellen Nussey's collection of Charlotte Bronte's letters and his buddy Clement Shorter making off with (just about all of) Arthur Bell Nicholls' collection of Charlotte Bronte's everything else.   

Most grudging antiquarian purchase: a volume of William Carus Wilson's sermons.  

Most aggravating experience teaching with e-texts: a website I had been using for years suddenly vanished without a trace.  

There is no excuse for a POD book to cost this much: Margaret Smith, ed., The Letters of Charlotte Bronte: Volume Three.  

Here's an interesting document that just came into my possession: it's a memorandum between Emily Sarah Holt and the publisher John F. Shaw for the sale of copyright to her novel Sister Rose:

The witnesses are Holt's brother James Maden Holt, MP and his fiancee, Anna Haworth.  Holt sold the copyright for forty-two pounds.

One of the problems with writing the history of nineteenth-century religious fiction from the nuts-and-bolts angle--copyrights, royalties, correspondence with publishers, recruiting authors, in-house readers, etc.--is that virtually all of the publishers' archives have simply vanished.  This is true even for still-extant publishers like the Religious Tract Society (now Lutterworth), where only partial records are available, and Burns and Oates (now Sheed and Ward), where the backfile survives but apparently not anything else.  It's quite possible that some archives are still hanging about in attics or on top of wardrobes!  This is the first time I have come across anything from John F. Shaw, a publisher with a large trade in relatively inexpensive Evangelical prize books.  

In 1870, Holt would have been at the beginning of her novel-writing career.  She had published a work of historical biography in 1861, Memoirs of Royal Ladies (2 vols.), with Hurst and Blackett, but the book was not well-received--not least because such collective biographies were regarded as an overworked genre by that point.  However, after regrouping, she had a good reception for Mistress Margery: A Tale of the Lollards (Shaw, 1868).  Holt was therefore not an unknown quantity, but not an established bestseller, either.  For comparative purposes, one of the Religious Tract Society's most popular novelists, Hesba Stretton, had up until the mid-1860s been receiving "between 30 guineas and £50 for single-volume stories," [1] which suggests that for this type of publisher and this type of book, £42 would not have been outrageously low.  It would be interesting to see what Holt was able to command a decade later.  

[1] Elaine Lomax, The Writings of Hesba Stretton: Reclaiming the Outcast (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 74.  

Favorite historical novels: Naivo, Beyond the Rice Fields; Mirandi Riwoe, Stone Sky Gold Mountain; Julie Janson, Benevolence; Stevie Davies, Awakening; Rose Tremain, Lily: A Tale of Revenge.

Favorite genre anthologies: Jess Walter, ed., The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2022; Mark Morris, ed., Close to Midnight.

Favorite single-author short story genre collection: Lisa Tuttle, The Dead Hours of Night.

Favorite genre deconstructions: John Darnielle, Devil House (true crime); J. W. Ocker, Twelve Nights at Rotter House (haunted house).

Favorite horror novel: Alison Rumfitt, Tell Me I'm Worthless. 

Author whose willingness to make himself look terrible in fiction never ceases to amaze: Anthony Horowitz's Hawthorne series.

Guaranteed to be the least-interesting villain in any neo-Victorian novel: Jack the Ripper.

Series detective with the most unconvincing ongoing career: Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus.

Somewhat puzzling genre development: multiple haunted-house novels that were just not...scary? (Not even in a "protagonist forced to plumb the depths of their misbegotten psyche" way.)

Biography with the most overblown title: John Lock and W. T. Dixon, A Man of Sorrow: The Life, Letters, and Times of the Reverend Patrick Bronte,  1777-1861.

Favorite biography: Michael Ledger-Lomas, Queen Victoria: This Thorny Crown.

After owning this monograph for nearly three decades, I finally have a reason to cite it: Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook.

Favorite book reread for class: Henry James, The Turn of the Screw.

Most antiquarian book purchase: a Religious Tract Society sammelband, featuring tracts published between 1785-90.  

Well, technically,  the Christmas Annual edition! As all good Victorianists know, the proper season for ghost stories was Christmas, so this year, I bring ghost stories published in Victorian periodicals' Christmas numbers.

• Anon., "Catherine's Quest" (Tinsley's Magazine, 1868).  A young woman has a very detailed dream about the intrigues (and murders) committed by her ancestors.  Also, there's a chest with human remains.  
• ---, "Experiences of Farthing Lodge" (Chambers' Journal, 1864).  Renters discover that on the fifteenth of each month, they share their lodgings with...something else.  
• Charles Collins, "No. 3 Branch Line.  The Compensation House" (All the Year Round, 1866).  A man has a very strange aversion to mirrors.
• W. W. Fenn, "The Steel Mirror: A Christmas Dream" (Routledge's Christmas Annual, 1867).  Prophetic mirrors are always aggravating, especially when somebody misreads the prophecy.  
• Eliza Lynn Linton, "Christmas Eve in Beach House" (Routledge's Christmas Annual, 1870).  An artist's wife has a very bad feeling about one of the locals.  Scandalous revelations eventually ensue.  This annual also includes a comic (and not well-executed) story about a young clerk obsessed with his employer's money, with what one presumes are ultimately fatal results, and another one about a tyrannical ship's captain who gets his comeuppance.
• ---, "The Legend of Lady House" (Routledge's Christmas Annual, 1869).  Women with dubious pasts, poisoning, curses, etc.  
• W. E. Norris, "The Specter of Strathannan" (Unwin's, 1887).  Apparently, a ghost appears to anyone who has terrible deeds upon their conscience.  Or does it?
• John Oxenford,  "His Umbrella" (All the Year Round, 1862).  A gentleman finds himself stuck with an aggravatingly persistent umbrella.
• Robert Reece,  "The Ghost in the Green Room" (Routledge's Christmas Annual, 1880).  The ghost of a failed actor decides it's finally time to get onstage.  

(Like rather a lot of other people, or so Twitter tells me, I found myself unable to read for anything except work for much of 2021.  More recently, I've found myself getting fully back into the swing of things.)

Best postcolonial rewrite of Adam and Eve: Michael Crummey, The Innocents.  

Best historical novels: Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet; Mudrooroo, Master of the Ghost Dreaming.

Best postapocalyptic novel: Paul Kingsnorth, Alexandria.  

Neo-Victorian fiction will be immensely improved by forgetting this personage ever existed: Jack the Ripper.  

"Well, that's a plot twist," I said, dubiously: Christian Klaver, The Classfied Dossier: Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula.

Sherlock Holmes novel that unintentionally makes a good case for the current Mrs. Watson divorcing the Doctor: Nicholas Meyer, The Return of the Pharoah: From the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D.

Perhaps we are exhausting this mine of pastiches: Sherlock Holmes.  

Novelist most willing to make himself look incompetent in fiction: Anthony Horowitz, A Line to Kill.  

Most interesting tribute anthology: When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired by Shirley Jackson.

Best horror anthology: The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, Volume One.  

Most epic schlimazels in the history of horror?: the protagonists of Gretchen Felker-Martin, Ego Homini Lupus.  

Creepiest use of medical terminology: Michael Blumlein, "Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case Report" (in Ellen Datlow, Body Shocks).

Most disturbing revenge tale: Kaaron Warren, "A Positive" (ditto).

Favorite monograph sent for review: Josephine McDonagh, Literature in a Time of Migration: British Fiction and the Movement of People, 1815-1876.

Favorite monographs on literature and religion: Christopher Stokes, Romantic Prayer: Reinventing the Poetics of Devotion, 1773-1832; Christopher D. Phillips, The Hymnal: A Reading History. 

Favorite historical monographs: Joseph Hardwick, An Anglican British World: The Church of England and the Expansion of the Settler Empire, c. 1790-1860; Rachel Wheeler, To Live upon Hope: Mohicans and MIssionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast.

Academic publisher whose business model I continue not to understand: Palgrave Macmillan.    

Finally, I found a copy of this: Rachel McCrindell, The Convent; A Narrative, Founded on Fact.  

Physically smallest book purchased this year: Old Jessie, The Hindoo Mother (a Methodist tract).

Most underrated short story by a Victorian woman writer?: Geraldine Jewsbury, "Agnes Lee."

Best mildly irate Victorian response to Jane Eyre: Margaret Oliphant, "The Story of a Wedding-Tour."

Least-enjoyable epic-length nineteenth-century poem: Charlotte Elizabeth, Osric.  

Every time I teach it, I am again convinced that this is Mary Elizabeth Braddon's best short story: "At Chrighton Abbey."

Victorian ghost stories of a sort that tend not to be anthologized: Mrs. Molesworth, The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction.  

Modernist novel with the worst TV adaptation: Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier. 

This blog arises from the dead for its annual cavalcade of horror stories.  This year, we feature...haunted professors, students, and academics of all stripes, somewhat loosely construed.  OK, very loosely construed.  In a number of cases, the horror is also somewhat loosely construed...

• "The Harvard College Ghost" (Ghost Stories: Collected with a Particular View to Counteract the Vulgar Beliefs in Ghost and Apparitions, 1846).  A prank goes off script.  
• "The College Ghost.  A Legend of Old South Middle" (Yale Literary Magazine, 1856).  A young man is visited by a ghastly vision that actually turns out to be a pretty terrible pun on this edition of Horace.
• S. Baring-Gouid, "The Brunswick Ghost" (Cassell's Family Magazine, 1887).  The ghost of an academic with some unfinished business comes back looking for help.
• J. Edmund V. Cooke, "The Hypnotized Ghost" (Overland Monthly, 1893).  A hypnotist finds himself controlling his the ghost of a dead man.
• M. R. Gilkeson, "Hobgoblins" (Oliver Optic's Magazine, 1873).  For children.  A German professor is invited out to help investigate the mystery of some ghostly sounds.  
• Henry Hill, "Professor Falkenstein's Ghost Story" (Godey's Magazine, 1878).  Professor Falkenstein narrates a story about making a deal with a musical ghost, only for there to be an unexpected twist.
• [Mary Ann Hoare], "The Ghost-Raiser" (Household Words, 1852).  A skeptical student faces off against the horror raised by a fellow traveler.  Er, sort of.
• M. R. James, "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad."  A professor ignores one of the most important rules in horror fiction: never take a vacation.  
• Augustus Jessopp, "An Antiquarian's Ghost Story" (Lantern, 1977; first published in 1880).  An antiquarian doing some research has a visitor.  And that's pretty much it.
• J. S. Le Fanu, "An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street" (Dublin University Magazine, 1851).  Two medical students discover that they're sharing their rooms with an unpleasant resident.
• Bram Stoker, "The Judge's House" (1891).  In a tip of the hat to Le Fanu, a student rents a house and, again, discovers that he's sharing his rooms with an unpleasant resident.
• [Walter Thornbury], "How Professor Gaster Lectured a Ghost" (All the Year Round, 1862).  After eating rather too much at dinner, Professor Gaster is surprised by the company of two chatty skeletons.  He out-chats them, however.  (In some versions, "Professor Gaster" is "Professor Pepsine.")

I previously discussed the oddities of Google Scholar in 2011 and 2015.  Another four years have passed, and yet...

1) Something there is that doesn't love a (moving) wall.  As I noted in a Twitter conversation a few weeks ago, it has become clear that GS scrapes a lot of its data from JSTOR.  But JSTOR's moving wall means that there is at least a three-year delay on journal issues becoming accessible in its database.  And, as it turns out, the knock-on effect for our purposes is that it can take a similar three years (or more) for citations to appear in your profile.  (One reference to Book Two from 2015, for example, cropped up only this year.) 

2) When Springer and Palgrave Macmillan attack! Books published by Palgrave Macmillan and available through Springer show up in GS as both individual titles and individual chapters.  As a result, GS inadvertently generates duplicate citations--an article with six citations may actually only have one.  

3) GoogleBooks blues.  Not surprisingly, one of GS' primary sources for book citations is GoogleBooks.  But this means that GS replicates all of the notorious metadata errors in GB.  Moreover, if, as is sometimes the case, there are multiple versions of the same book in the GB archive in slightly different formats, GS will simply pick them up as different citations.

4) Book review aggregation.  GS seems to have a hard time with the publication format of book reviews, as it is often the case that one ends and another begins on the same page.  It thus may count a review twice--once individually and once as part of a larger set of reviews treated as a single article.  (Moreover, it will do this both with reviews you have written and with reviews of your work.)

5) Amazingly, there are academics on this planet who do not write in English.  GS' access to non-Anglophone scholarship seems to be...scattershot.

My advice remains as it has been for the last eight years: anyone using the numbers for purposes of hiring, tenure, and promotion (or polemic, for that matter) needs to treat them as approximate, at best, and proceed with due caution.  

• Favorite fiction: Kate Atkinson, Transcription; Richard Beard, Lazarus is Dead; Hamish Clayton, Wulf; Barbara Hanrahan, The Albatross Muff; Jeannette Ng, Under the Pendulum Sun; Caryl Phillips, A View of the Empire at Sunset; Adam Roberts, The Black Prince.
• Favorite historical mystery: Elizabeth Haynes, The Murder of Harriet Monckton.
• Detective with most eye-watering dress sense: Richard Jepherson in Kim Newman’s The Man from the Diogenes Club. 
• Weirdest take on Christianity: Robert Shearman, “Pumpkin Kids.”
• There are unpleasant boarding schools and then there are…whatever this is: Colin Winnette,  The Job of the Wasp.
• Novel that made me want to yell “Why on earth would you ever keep doing this?!” over and over again, which is pretty awkward when you’re on a plane to the UK: Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.
• Novel reread for the first time since I was about ten: Louisa May Alcott, Little Women.
• Best novels reread for class: Laura Fish, Strange Music; Caryl Phillips, Cambridge; Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier.
• Most fun novel to teach: Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier. 
• Now I’m seeing it everywhere: The result of teaching a Pilgrim’s Progress course. 
• Actually Dickensian neo-Victorian novel: Stephen Jarvis, Death and Mr. Pickwick.
• Most unusual bildungsroman: Lorna Gibb, A Ghost’s Story.
• Best unintentional demonstration that nineteenth-century economists were not necessarily brilliant novelists: Robert Torrens. 
• Discovery resulting in a moment of existential despair: Turning up far too many Victorian epic poems about the Crusades.  (It has occurred to me that I should really do some writing about Victorian religious poetry.  However…)
• What is this I just read: A Christian with Two Wives.
• There are times one suspects the author lacks inspiration: The first name of the Lady Macbeth equivalent in Jo Nesbo’s Macbeth is…Lady. 
• Most unusual Sherlock Holmes pastiche: Gordon Alpine, Holmes Untangled.
• Funniest Sherlock Holmes pastiche: G. S. Denning’s ongoing Warlock Holmes series.  OK, the humor is broad, but I laughed anyway.
• Sherlock Holmes mashup trend that is not perhaps entirely necessary: Do we need two different series in which Holmes gets mixed up with the Cthulhu mythos?
• Sherlock Holmes anthology that best created the fiction of a singular voice: Christopher Sequeira, ed., Sherlock Holmes: The Australian Casebook.
• Most wearisome ongoing Neo-Victorian trend: Given the number of Jack the Ripper copycats wandering through nineteenth-century London, it’s amazing that England made it into the twentieth century with most of its female population intact. 
• Monograph finally discounted enough for me to purchase it: The third volume of Michael Watts’ study of Nonconformity in Britain. 
• Most antiquarian purchases: Barbara Hofland’s The Blind Farmer and His Children and a first edition of Grace Kennedy’s Father Clement, both 1823; Elizabeth Sandham, Providential Care, a Tale Founded on Fact, 1825.     
• The duplication blues: Yet again, I somehow managed to purchase books I already owned. 

The selling point of Mowgli has been its "dark" quality, in comparison to the song-and-dance animated Jungle Book feature and, for that matter, the more recent live adaptation (the film which came, saw, and conquered this one, cinematic-release speaking).  In practice, this results in a kind of tonal dissonance: Mowgli's frequently light-hearted coming-of-age narrative runs smack into a much bloodier story about the ethics of hunting.  (TL;DR: hunting for food, good; hunting for sport, bad.)  As a result, it's not always clear whom the film is for, a problem accentuated by the sometimes odd CGI (Shere Khan and Father Wolf are especially...off) and the sometimes cartoonish, sometimes very brutal violence. Interestingly enough, Mowgli turns out to have its competitor's problem with the in-universe politics of Mowgli's identity as a human being, and yet solves them it in a way that arguably out-Kiplings Kipling.

Mowgli's narrative combines the Mowgli tales from the first Jungle Book, including Shere Khan's manipulation of wolfpack politics, Mowgli's kidnapping by the Bandar-Log (here just known as the Monkey People), and Mowgli's time in the village, although it concludes by foreshadowing his afterlife as Master of the Jungle in the Second Jungle Book (without mentioning that, in his late teens, he returns to his adoptive family).  Moreover, there is a new addition who serves as a pivot point, a deconstructed Great White Hunter (seriously) with a drinking problem and the perhaps somewhat odd habit of lugging all of his hunting trophies around with him.  (Lockwood's obsession with Shere Khan turns out to be a sort of discount Moby Dick plot.) . Much of the tension in the film's first half derives from a rite of passage nowhere in Kipling, the "running," which qualifies the cubs for full membership in the pack; Mowgli's physical inability to keep up with the other cubs, which marks him out as a "freak" alongside his runty albino friend Bhoot, would disqualify him, were it not that he learns to master tree-climbing instead.  It is only Bagheera's deliberate intervention that cheats Mowgli out of winning the contest and inadvertently leads him to being captured by the Bandar-Log.  Mowgli's desire to be accepted, just like everyone else--one of the most popular plots in all of children's and YA film--supplants the original story's explanation for the loathing with which the other wolves regard him: "The others they hate thee because their eyes cannot meet thine; because thou art wise; because thou hast pulled out thorns from their feet—because thou art a man" ("Mowgli's Brothers").  Instead of the film's more generic "we're special!" with which Mowgli's buddy Bhoot tries to console him, the short story very clearly insists on the animals' instinctive recognition of human superiority.  By the same token, the film displaces just about all of the nastiness of human nature (aside from some children being jerks) onto Lockwood, the aforementioned hunter; the villagers, it is made clear, have every right to want to eliminate Shere Khan (who is eating their cattle and, of course, has a history of eating them as well).  Notably, Mowgli never speaks with another human being, although the stories emphasize that he picks up the language very quickly--a kind of distancing that makes it easier for him to abandon the village at the end in order to return to the jungle.

Structurally, as the film makes explicit in Kaa's concluding voiceover, Lockwood and Shere Khan are two aspects of the same violation of jungle law.  Early on, Bagheera explains to Mowgli that hunting for food is both "sacred" and a "right," but one must never hunt for pleasure.  Shere Khan, who kills cows for the fun of it (an especial violation of the law, as it brings humans into the jungle seeking vengeance), is the animal equivalent of Lockwood, a sportsman who displays rather than eats his kills.  (It doesn't help that Lockwood's trophies include half of one of Hathi's tusks and, alas, the taxidermied Bhoot.) Lockwood's implied alcoholism functions similarly to Shere Khan's limp, inasmuch as both have problems with mobility (and, unfortunately for Lockwood, aiming).  Moreover, it is clearly the manner of killing that is also at issue.  First, in a reworking of the original, Akela evicts Mowgli from the pack for saving him with fire, a human weapon; later, Lockwood gifts Mowgli a knife with which to hunt.  Mowgli's success at killing Shere Khan (here, with the help of elephants instead of buffalo) is the moment when he truly establishes himself as a successful man-wolf hybrid: Mowgli can kill Shere Khan because he isn't a wolf, and uses the knife to finally finish him off, but he also kills using the same intimacy prescribed by jungle law.  Lockwood, by contrast, uses a gun, and the gunsight paradoxically makes him unable to see his own oncoming death.  Having erased both the law-breakers and the overly-hidebound from the narrative--Akela dies fighting with Shere Khan, another deviation from Kipling--the film leaves the field open for Mowgli's creativity to rejuvenate jungle law.  Being different, rather than being human, turns out to save the day--and yet, in the end, Mowgli's difference remains predicated on his being human.

A colleague recently remarked that boredom is part of the educational process: not all learning can be made "entertaining," and there are times when mastering a subject means doing a lot of dull work (repetition, dealing with "dry" texts, reviewing previous lessons, etc.).  The "discipline" in discipline, in other words.  I was thinking the other day, though, of the kinds of boredom inherent in teaching that the instructor, too, has to overcome.  At the most basic level, most of us eventually develop a stable repertoire of courses that we are expected to offer on a regular basis--the lower-division survey course, for example--that, because of our other professional obligations, cannot be revised extensively on any regular basis.  (For those of us with heavier teaching loads, having courses that eventually don't need extensive prep time is essential, especially when you hit that phase of your career when you are also expected to do a lot of service work.)  That's particularly the case if the works on the syllabus were designed to "talk" to each other, in which case removing one can cause aggravating domino effects down the line.  Similarly, it often becomes clear that some works consistently resonate with the local student population and others consistently don't, which means that the former tend to appear more often on one's syllabus and the latter less (or not at all); this leads to situations like teaching Jane Eyre in four classes out of six, as I once did many years ago.  (I'm a big fan of Jane Eyre! Great novel! But there are limits!)   And some of the repetitive drills that bore students also bore the instructors.  

I suppose some might argue that you should be upfront with the students about this, in the interests of authenticity, or the production of empathy, or the demonstrated of a shared (lack of) affect, etc.  A professor from my undergraduate days was, in fact, rather notorious for "being himself" in that manner, and had a habit of telling students things like "wow, I just don't feel like teaching today"; while I gather the students may have made sympathetic noises in class, the noises they made outside of class sure as heck weren't.  ("Great," one of his students said to me one day, "I guess we can leave now?") Putting aside the useful reminder that the student responses to personal revelations that you see may not be the student responses that you don't, the "discipline" in discipline pertains here too.  While the reasons for boredom may be different ("I've taught this poem so many times I can recite it backwards while balancing on one foot on top of a hardboiled egg"), the necessity of modeling how to do the work remains.  There is always something that can reanimate an overfamiliar text--a discussion session, a question, a serendipitous article or monograph (on a totally different subject, even), a new pedagogical technique...

One of the worst things you can do in a Gothic narrative is travel, and Sarah Perry's Melmoth features one inset narrative after another of migrants, whether from another town or (more usually) another country.  As the title suggests, the novel is loosely inspired by Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and borrows its structure, with overtones of the legends of the Wandering Jew and Faust, the Pilgrim's Progress, John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (Alice Benet's story is lifted from that of Rose Allin), and (perhaps) William Godwin's St. Leon (1799).  Perry's Melmoth, however, is not the man who scoffed at Christ en route to Calvary, but rather a woman who saw Christ's empty tomb and "denied what she'd seen" (69).  This subtle shift in the legend, which turns Melmoth into not the Wanderer but rather the "Witness,"  transforms its implications: in refusing to testify to the Resurrection, Melmoth equally refuses to testify to the possibilities of faith and hope; she negates her own witnessing and attempts to undermine that of her companions.  Her sentence, then, is to wander eternally, witnessing all the horrors of the world but offering no "hope of comfort" (244), no action, and no alternatives.  Speaking to Melmoth means confronting the result of one's sins, but without the possibility of redemption--the cross, as it were, is empty.  In the terms of the Pilgrim's Progress, she is the Giant Despair, who unlike Maturin's Melmoth has no end to her journey.  

Melmoth's characters are all fundamentally mediocre, to varying degrees (with perhaps the exception of the ex-barrister, Thea).  Yet their sins have enormous consequences: genocide, wrongful imprisonment, torture.  Moreover, these sins occur across religious, racial, and political boundaries, often against those who are in proximity yet assumed to be "other."  Josef Hoffman, for example, is a German child who emigrates to Czechoslovakia with his parents, whom he resents; during the German occupation, he turns in a Jewish family to the authorities out of jealous rage, and they die in Theresienstadt.  And then his own family is eventually targeted when the Germans lose.  Josef, a German, is at home in Czechoslovakia, yet not at home, while the Jews attempt to rewrite their identity with "forged papers" (129) but accidentally give themselves away on the Sabbath precisely because they have begun to feel too at home.  Their quest for home constantly destabilizes, with fatal results, as each tries to manipulate boundaries that have a bad habit of snapping back.  When Melmoth confronts Josef on the street as he is being marched away, it is at the moment when he is faced with another moral choice: does he betray the local policeman as a fellow German, or does he allow him to continue passing as a Czech? The temptation Melmoth offers Josef is that of embracing his sinfulness and therefore refusing to act.  "What is left for you but suffering?" she asks.  "What is left but the just outcome of all your iniquity?" (142) His decision to refuse her, which he describes as "the sole act of courage of my life" (143), is done without hope of salvation, let alone any recognition; after all, he cannot tell if the policeman understands that Josef's brief assault on him is actually the ploy that saves his life.  Melmoth's enraged question "Do you think there's enough blood in you to settle the debt?" (143) offers an economy of redemption refuted by her own existence; yet as we see near the end, in the case of the nameless man who decides that "he'd seek neither light nor grace" (242), embracing Melmoth's despair means, in effect, the nightmare life-in-death.  Rejecting Melmoth, though, does not mean choosing happiness, but choosing righteous action, even though that does nothing to erase all the sins that came before.  Helen Franklin's life of ascetic penance is one long failed atonement; the true breakthrough is when she finally realizes "the prospect of redemption by meeting hope with hope" (266), no matter how dim the hope might be.  

As Halloween is almost upon us, it is time for another round of horrible happenings.  Our theme this year: thirteen tales of horrific romance! 

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, "The Cold Embrace": Guy jilts girl, girl has other ideas.   

Gottfried Bürger, "Lenore":  The dead ride fast.

Eugene Field, "The Werewolf": One leg of a medieval love triangle turns out to have an awkward problem (you may need to search).  

Elizabeth Gaskell, "The Old Nurse's Story": Two sisters feud over a handsome music teacher, with unfortunate results.  

Julian Hawthorne, "Ken's Mystery": Flirting with women who sit on graves is not always the best plan.  

Rudyard Kipling, "The Phantom Rickshaw": A man's cruelty in the aftermath of an affair comes back to bite him.    

J. S. Le Fanu, "Schalken the Painter": When arranging a marriage, it is generally a good idea to ask why the intended husband is not breathing.  

M. G. Lewis, "The Cloud-King": Young woman chooses the wrong elemental, discovers that the next day's menu is not at all to her liking.  

Florence Marryat, "The Ghost of Charlotte Cray": An older woman who has been badly treated is not letting the man off so easily...

Edith Nesbit, "John Charrington's Wedding": Some ghosts are determined not to let death stand in the way of marriage.

John William Polidori, "The Vampyre": Where the fad for sexy vampires began.  

Frank Stockton, "The Spectral Mortgage": A new ghost in town finds romance (you may need to scroll down).  

Edith Wharton, "The House of the Dead Hand": A young woman is unable to escape her father's obsession with a painting by Leonardo.  

This afternoon, I was doing what passes for academic multi-tasking--i.e., reading a scholarly essay collection while eating dinner--and found myself yelping in pain every time a well-known historian of religion cited "Osborn W. Trenery Heighway's" Jewish conversion narrative Leila Ada as a straight-up biographical source.  Because I'm afraid it isn't.   I've previously registered my suspicion that Francis Edward Paget's A Student Penitent of 1695 should not be touched with the proverbial ten-foot pole, or even a twenty-foot pole, until somebody verifies that the letters it claims to reprint actually exist.  (For some reason, neither Google nor Typepad will let me call up the post right now, but while the people in the book are real, the letters are so straight-up Victorian in prose style that surely they ought to ring alarm bells.)  At least one doctoral dissertation mistakes Emily Lawless' With Essex in Ireland for an actual diary. This doesn't constitute an epidemic--quite the contrary, there are just a handful of examples--but it's worth noting that the books causing all the trouble are precisely the ones that claim to be some combination of memoir, journal, or epistolary collection.  I have similar questions about an "autobiography" I briefly mention in an article I have forthcoming next year (my verdict: the book sure acts like it's a novel--but while its relevance doesn't have anything to do with its reality in this instance, I'm still not sure if I should drop it anyway).  Some nineteenth-century things are not what they claim to be, and we don't always know what they are until it's too late...

I probably would have been more exercised by Sokal Part Deux about a dozen years ago or so, but perhaps because it's Sokal Part Deux I'm not sure what, if anything, will be accomplished by this exercise.  Did Sokal's experiment produce any demonstrable effect on its targets, and if so, where?  Ironically, I became relatively disinterested in theory per se as part of going to a "theory school" as an undergraduate, as it seemed to me that while theory was certainly helpful in formulating questions, "doing" a certain type of reading was a mechanical exercise at best (pedagogically useful--the best way of learning a new approach is to do it, after all--but not as a scholarly life goal).  And some theoretical approaches don't actually seem to be applicable: there's a certain kind of essay that starts off with a complex theoretical framework and then promptly collapses into a close reading or very traditional historical analysis.  Eboo Patel's essay, I think, sums up my response: at some point, your theory will fail, and it's your job to figure out what to do about that.  (That is, at base, what Book One is about; Book Two, for that matter, involved a process of realizing that a historical theory about anti-Catholic rhetoric did not, in fact, account for the evidence.) But that requires a certain detachment from one's theory.    

Because I was a somewhat odd undergraduate, I read things like the National Association of Scholars journal, and I was more puzzled and uninspired by them than anything else.  I could see what they didn't like, but there was no positive program for what they did.  There was nothing, that is, to emulate.  So, after academic-ing for several years, I finally arrived at the position that the only thing to do was my work, and if I had something to complain about, then I needed to complain about it by actively doing something different.  Of course, sometimes nobody listens.  (My polite suggestion that if one is going to talk about John Stuart Mill in respect to universities, then one should talk about John Stuart Mill's writing on university education, and not about John Stuart Mill on free speech more generally--as it is not clear that they are the same thing--seems not to have gone anywhere.)  Still, I became interested in literary history because I take delight in figuring out how books work together, and because I think that that's useful to know, whatever books I happen to be writing about at the time.  And so I read a lot of books that, taken individually, are not always delightful (sometimes resulting in the "distant reading" effect--as in, "why am I not one hundred miles distant from this novel by E. H. Dering?"), along with whatever helps me figure out the best ways to understand them.  But I'd prefer not to talk about it, I suppose.  (Even this post might qualify as too much talking.)