This Week's Acquisitions

(So, er, I did go to the Strand.)

• Leo Braudy, Haunted: On Ghosts, Witches, Vampires, Zombies, and Other Monsters of the Natural and Supernatural Worlds (Yale, 2016).  Historical analysis of how horror emerges and functions at moments of spiritual and political crisis.  (Strand)
• Anne Dewitt, Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel (Cambridge, 2013).  Argues that Victorian novelists critiqued attempts by the professionalizing scientific community to make themselves arbiters of modern morality.  (Strand)
• Claire Jarvis, Exquisite Masochism: Marriage, Sex & the Novel Form (Johns Hopkins, 2016).  Explores what happens to the marriage plot when the female protagonists turn out to be "dominant."  (Strand)
• Devoney Looser, The Making of Jane Austen (Johns Hopkins, 2017).  Appropriations of and responses to Austen from the Victorians to the present.  (Strand)
• Adrian J. Wallbank, Dialogue, Didacticism, and the Genres of Dispute (Routledge, 2016).  Examines the post-Enlightenment role of the dialogue form in political and religious debates.  (Amazon)
• Robert Mayer, Walter Scott & Fame: Authors and Readers in the Romantic Age (Oxford, 2017).  How Scott interacted with his multiple audiences over the course of his career.  I'm reviewing this for Choice.  (Review copy)
• Franny Moyle, Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde (Pegasus, 2011).  As the title says--a biography of Constance Wilde.  (Strand)
• Susan Matoff, Marguerite, Countess of Blessington: The Turbulent Life of a Salonniere and Author (Delaware, 2016).  New biography of the Countess' career as an author and editor, as well as her influence in contemporary literary circles.  (Strand)
• Dominic Janes, Oscar Wilde Prefigured: Queer Fashioning and British Caricature, 1750-1900 (Chicago, 2016).  Analyzes the emergence of "camp stereotypes" in representations of male clothing and bodies from the mid-eighteenth century onward. (Strand)
• Robin M. Jensen, The Cross: History, Art, and Controversy (Harvard, 2017).  Shifting representations of and reactions to the cross from early Christianity to the present.  (Strand)
• Paul Goldman and Simon Cooke, eds., Reading Victorian Illustration, 1855-1875 (Ashgate, 2012).  Woodcuts, major themes (e.g., death), collecting, gift-books, etc. (Strand)
• Joel Peter Eigen, Mad-Doctors in the Dock: Defending the Diagnosis, 1760-1913 (Johns Hopkins, 2016).  A new history of how the insanity defense gained respectability in the English court system.  (Strand)