This Week's Acquisitions
- Karen Hellekson, The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time (Kent State, 2001). Links the alternate history novel to more general questions of historical practice; authors covered include Philip K. Dick, Poul Anderson, and Brian Aldiss.
- Richard Jefferies, The Dewy Morn (Wildwood, 1982). Reprint of Jefferies' 1884 pastoral novel. For more on Jefferies, see here.
- Simon Heffer, Moral Desperado: A Life of Thomas Carlyle (Phoenix, 1995). Recent biography of "a magnificent, defiant and often lonely individualist" (blurb). There's a good Carlyle overview at the Victorian Web. His wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, was an outstanding correspondent; see the Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle (1883).
- Peter Martin, A Life of James Boswell (Yale, 2002). The most recent scholarly biography. There are some useful Boswell links available from Chris Wiley; his will is also online. Jack Lynch has been editing Boswell's Life of Johnson--it's currently up to 1763.
- Paschal B. Kyiiripuo Kyoore, The African and Caribbean Historical Novel in French: A Quest for Identity (Peter Lang, 1996). Postcolonial interpretation. (Yes, this is off my beaten path, but I'm doing a bibliographical review essay on historical fiction.)
- Stephen Harris, The Fiction of Gore Vidal and E. L. Doctorow (Peter Lang, 2002). The two novelists in relation to the American tradition in historical fiction.
- Ian Firla, ed., Robert Graves's Historical Novels (Peter Lang, 2000). The Claudius novels, King Jesus, etc.
- Robert Irvine, Enlightenment and Romance: Gender and Agency in Smollett and Scott (Peter Lang, 2000). Another attempt to theorize the relationship between romance and the historical novel.
- Lisa Jardine, On a Grander Scale: The Outstanding Life of Christopher Wren (HarperCollins, 2003). New life of the great architect. For examples of Wren's work, see here.
- Elizabeth Traice, Mistress Elizabeth Spencer: A Story of the Times of Queen Elizabeth (Nelson, 1895). A short historical romance in which Queen Elizabeth plays matchmaker.
- The Visitor, or Monthly Instructor, for 1838. A full year of this Religious Tract Society journal, featuring various "improving" articles.