This Week's Acquisitions
- A. D. Nuttall, Dead from the Waist Down: Scholars and Scholarship in Literature and the Popular Imagination (Yale, 2003). Uses the Isaac Casaubon/Mark Pattison/the Rev. Casaubon link to investigate the literary history of the asexual scholar. (For more on Mark Pattison and George Eliot's Casaubon, see Kali Israel's Names and Stories: Emilia Dilke and Victorian Culture.)
- Giles Foden, Ladysmith (Knopf, 2001). Historical novel about a South African town during the Boer War, told from multiple points of view.
- Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, Florence Macarthy (Henry Colburn, 1845). A reprint in Colburn's "Standard Novels" series of Lady Morgan's national tale, discussed in two posts below.
- Jerome Christensen, Romanticism at the End of History (Johns Hopkins, 2000). Multiple readings in Romantic historicisms.
- Paula Backscheider, ed., Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century "Women's Fiction" and Social Engagement (Johns Hopkins, 2002). Essays (which are rather lengthier than the norm for this kind of collection) on the role of women in shaping a number of novelistic genres, such as the Gothic.
- James M. Cahalan, The Irish Novel: A Critical History (Twayne, 1988). Argues that the Irish novel has its own literary tradition, one separate from a larger entity dubbed "the English novel" or "the British novel."
- John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, 2 vols. (Everyman, 1969). Reprint of the nineteenth-century biography by one of Dickens' close friends, first published between 1872 and 1874. There is an e-text available.
- Stanley Ayling, George the Third (Knopf, 1972). A generally affectionate biography.
- Mrs. [Dinah Mulock] Craik, A Life for a Life (Collins' Clear-Type Press, n.d.). A novel told from two different first-person perspectives, "Her Story" and "His Story." On Mrs. Craik, see the ever-reliable Victorian Web.
- Henry Mackenzie, Mackenzie's Works (Harper, 1837). Reprints all of Mackenzie's writings, including his three novels. Mackenzie's most famous novel, The Man of Feeling, is available online; for Mackenzie himself, see Slainte and Electric Scotland (which reprints what looks like a nineteenth-century assessment). Incidentally, you can take a look at his will.
- Michael Thorpe, Clough: The Critical Heritage (RKP, 1972). Reprints nineteenth- and twentieth-century critical assessments (reviews, etc.) of this slightly offbeat Victorian poet. Clough's poetry can be found here; there's a biography at (where else?) the Victorian Web.
- R. M. Seiler, ed., Walter Pater: The Critical Heritage (RKP, 1980). Another volume in the series. Oddly enough, Pater doesn't have his own website, but he does have the usual entry at the Victorian Web. An entire collection of critical essays on Pater, Pater in the 1990s, is online, and Pater's own books can be found at Project Gutenberg.