This Week's Acquisitions

Brace yourselves.  I had perhaps just a little too much fun at Powell's.  I would strongly advise my parents to avert their eyes.

• Emma Leslie, The Chained Bible (RTS, n.d.).  A very short children's novel about Anne Boleyn's contribution to the English Reformation.
• Matteo Maria Boiardo, Orlando Innamorato, trans. Charles Stanley Ross (Oxford, 1995).  New translation of the 15th century poem, which in turn inspired Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. 
• Emile Zola, Lourdes, trans. Ernest Alfred Vizetelly (Sutton, 2000).  First in a trilogy about a troubled Catholic priest. 
• Felicia Hemans, Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials, ed. Susan J. Wolfson (Princeton, 2000).  New scholarly edition. 
• Pat Barker, Double Vision (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).  Post 9-11 novel about two journalists attempting (and failing) to escape from the horrors they've seen.
• Imre Kertesz, Liquidation (Knopf, 2004).  A man tries to understand why his friend, an author and Holocaust survivor, committed suicide.
• ---, Kaddish for an Unborn Child (Vintage, 2004).  The narrator's refusal to father a child in a post-Holocaust world.
• ---, Fatelessness (Vintage, 2004).  A teenager finds himself in Auschwitz, yet is rejected by the other Jews. 
• Patrick McGrath, Spider (Vintage).  Neo-Gothic novel, featuring one of McGrath's usual insane narrators.
• Iain Sinclair, Landor's Tower (Granta, 2001).  "A writer, who has lived for years in London, reluctantly acknowledges his growing obsession with the Ewyas Valley on the border of England and Wales."More on Sinclair at the Complete Review.
• Barry Unsworth, Sugar and Rum (Norton, 1988).  A novelist struggles with his book on the slave trade.  (Unsworth wrote the novel while also working on Sacred Hunger; a similar Unsworth stand-in shows up in Losing Nelson.) 
• John Gaskin, The Dark Companion: Ghost Stories (Lilliput, 2001).  Ghost stories by a philosopher. 
• John Hawkes, Whistlejacket (Secker & Warburg, 1989).  Murder, photography, and, indeed, Whistlejacket. 
• Henry James, The Other House (NYRB, 1999).  An atypical Henry James novel about sexual obsession and murder.
• Jonathan Coe, The Winshaw Legacy (Vintage, 1996). Vicious satire on Thatcher's Britain, as told through a history of the world's most godawful family.

• Nancy J. Curtin, The United Irishmen: Popular Politics in Ulster and Dublin 1791-1798 (Clarendon, 1998).  Birth of the Irish republican movement.
• Krisztina Fenyo, Contempt, Sympathy, and Romance: Lowland Perceptions of the Highlands and the Clearances During the Famine Years, 1845-1855 (Tuckwell, 2000).  Focuses on journalism. 
• Peter H. Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (California, 2001).  Exhibitions in their imperial context, from the Great Exhibition to the Festival of Empire. See also The Crystal Palace.
• David Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (Yale, 1999).  Reprint of one of the best studies of this radical essayist.
• Sophia Andres, The Pre-Raphaelite Art of the Victorian Novel (Ohio, 2005).  Relationships between Pre-Raphaelite painting and fictional narrative. 
• Alan Rauch, Useful Knowledge: The Victorians, Morality, and the March of Intellect (Duke, 2001).  Victorian "information culture," as it were.  For more information about the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, try the Penny Magazine (also here and here) and Maphisteria (er, maps).
• Michael S. Foldy, The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality, and Late-Victorian Society (Yale, 1997).  The trials in their historical context.
• Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small, Oscar Wilde's Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2000).  Archival study of Wilde's writing career. 
• Stephen Prickett, Narrative, Religion and Science : Fundamentalism versus Irony, 1700-1999 (Cambridge, 2002). Prickett, a well-known specialist in literature and religion, discusses story-telling as a means of making sense of the world.

• George Turnbull, Principles of Moral and Christian Philosophy, 2 vols., ed. Alexander Broadie (Liberty Fund, 2005). Another entry in the "Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics" series. For background on Turnbull, visit the University of Aberdeen.

• Nicholas Atkin and Frank Tallett, Priests, Prelates & People: A History of European Catholicism Since 1750 (Oxford, 2003).  The Church's attempt to negotiate modern trends in European politics. 
• Duncan Forrester & Douglas Murray, eds., Studies in the History of Worship in Scotland, 2nd ed. (T&T Clark, 1996).  Historical overview of Scottish liturgy.
• Elaine McFarland, Protestants First: Orangeism in 19th Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1990).  Rise and development of "Protestant militantism." 
• Kenneth Hylson-Smith, The Churches in England from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II: Volume III, 1833-1998 (SCM, 1998).  Ecclesiastical history. 
• Jaroslav Pelikan, Whose Bible Is It? A History of the Scriptures Through the Ages (Viking, 2005).  A brief survey of debates over Biblical translation, canonization, and interpretation. 
• Raphael Samuel, Island Stories: Unravelling Britain.  Theatres of Memory, Volume II (Verso, 1998).  Posthumous collection dealing with the British historical imagination. 
• William Benzie, Dr. F. J. Furnivall: A Victorian Scholar Adventurer (Pilgrim, 1983).  The radical Furnivall's contributions to Victorian academic and political culture. 
• Jonathan Bate, John Clare: A Biography (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).  One of the most brilliant "peasant poets." 
• Walter L. Arnstein, Queen Victoria (Palgrave, 2003).  A brief "thematic" biography. 
• Jerusha Hull McCormack, The Man Who Was Dorian Gray (St. Martin's, 2000).  Combines fact and fiction in an attempt to recreate the life of John Gray, the poet and Catholic priest, who partly inspired Wilde's novel. 
• Rudyard Kipling, The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, Volume 3: 1900-10, ed. Thomas Pinney (Iowa, 1996).  Exactly what it sounds like.
• Robert Louis Stevenson, Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Ernest Mehew (Yale, 1997).  From the standard Yale edition.
• Florence Nightingale, Florence Nightingale: Letters from the Crimea, ed. Sue M. Goldie (Mandolin, 1997). Details Nightingale's attempts to reform the army's medical services.

• Jonathan David Gross, ed., Byron's "Courbeau Blanc": The Life and Letters of Lady Melbourne (Rice, 1997).  Mostly Lady Melbourne's letters to Byron.