This Week's Acquisitions
- E. Lynn Linton, The True History of Joshua Davidson, Christian and Communist, 6th ed. (Chatto & Windus, [1874]). By far the most successful of the agnostic Linton's novels. A man who may or may not be Christ reincarnated tries to live according to the true principles of the gospels, only to wind up murdered; the novel is narrated by a follower tellingly named "John." The VWWP has an e-text of the 1872 edition; some background on Linton here and here.
- Mrs. [Margaret] Oliphant, Kirsteen: The Story of a Scotch Family Seventy Years Ago (Macmillan and Co., 1895). One of Mrs. Oliphant's few historical novels. There's a website devoted to her work; see also the overview of her life at the Victorian Web.
- David Mitchell, Ghostwritten: A Novel (Vintage, 2001). Mitchell's first novel.
- Irene Nemirovsky, Suite Francaise (Knopf, 2006). Nemirovsky's unfinished novel about the occupation of France.
- John Henry Blunt, The Real Presence: A Sermon (Rivingtons, 1853). Apparently, Blunt got into trouble over transubstantiation; the sermon is intended to clarify his position. Blunt's Annotated Book of Common Prayer is available from Project Canterbury; brief biography here.
- Hugo Grotius, Commentary on the Law of Prize And Booty (LibertyFund, 2006). Another entry in the Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics series.
- Peter Fritzche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Harvard, 2004). Theories of history and temporality, post-French Revolution.
- Linda Zionkowski, Men's Work: Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Poetry, 1660-1784 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). Gendered concepts of authorship in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.