This week's acquisitions

(No, I didn't break the bank this week. As I think I've mentioned before, I'm working on a bibliographical review essay for a library acquisitions journal, and so I'm getting a lifetime supply of review copies.)

• Charlotte Yonge, The Chaplet of Pearls; Or, the Black and White Ribaumont (Macmillan, 1890). High Church historical novel set in sixteenth-century France. E-text here.
• ---, English Church History: Adapted for Use in Day and Sunday Schools and for General Family Reading (National Society's Depository, 1883). Children's ecclesiastical history from a High Church perspective.
• Annette Whymper, The Autobiography of a Missionary Box (RTS, probably the 1905 reprint). A humble charity box helps save a family. The sort of "object narrative" made famous by the eighteenth-century satire Chrysal; Or, Adventures of a Guinea; among the religious takes on the genre are J. W. Cunningham's The Velvet Cushion and G. E. Sargent's Story of a Pocket-Bible.
• Mary C. Rowsell, Traitor or Patriot? A Tale of the Rye-House Plot (Blackie & Son, 1885). Conspiracy against Charles II and the Duke of York.
• Emma Marshall, In the Service of Rachel Lady Russell (Seeley & Co., 1893). Overlaps with Rowsell's novel. Lady Rachel Russell (1636-1723) was something of a Victorian cult figure.
• Father Charles Chiniquy, Fifty Years in the Church of Rome (Baker, 1965). Reprint of the 1886 London edition. Virulent (and very, very, very long) anti-Catholic screed by a priest-turned-Presbyterian.
• Martin Middeke and Werner Huber, Biofictions: The Rewriting of Romantic Lives in Contemporary Fiction and Drama (Camden House, 1999). Blake, Scott, Shelley, etc.
• Fiona Robertson, Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction (Clarendon, 1994). Outstanding study of Scott's ambivalent relationship to Gothic narrative forms.
• Catherine Jones, Literary Memory: Scott's Waverley Novels and the Psychology of Narrative (Bucknell, 2003). Scott and Enlightenment "sciences of the mind."
• Ray B. Browne and Lawrence A. Kreiser, Jr., eds., The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction (Popular Press, 2000). Essays on major authors in the genre, including Umberto Eco, Anne Perry, and Ellis Peters.
• Amy J. Elias. Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Johns Hopkins, 2001). The emergence of the "metahistorical romance."
• Ruth Hoberman, Gendering Classicism: The Ancient World in Twentieth-Century Women's Historical Fiction (SUNY, 1997). Studies six novelists, including Mary Butts, Naomi Mitchison, and Mary Renault.
• Anne K. Kaler, ed., Cordially Yours, Brother Cadfael (Popular Press, 1998). Explicates Peters' use of theological and historical sources in the enormously popular Brother Cadfael novels.
• Angelyn Mitchell, The Freedom to Remember: Narrative, Slavery, and Gender in Contemporary Black Women's Fiction (Rutgers, 2002). Rereading slavery's historical legacy in Octavia Butler, Sherley Ann Williams, and Toni Morrison, among others.
• David W. Price, History Made, History Imagined: Contemporary Literature, Poesis, and the Past (Illinois, 1999). The novel as a mode of philosophy of history; includes readings of Carlos Fuentes, Salman Rushdie, Ishmael Reed, and Mario Vargas Llosa, among others.
• Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form (Oxford, 1999). Analyzes the genre's emergence in the wake of 1960s politics; discusses William Styron, Ishmael Reed, Sherley Anne Williams and Charles Johnson, among others.
• Caroline Rody, The Daughter's Return: African-American and Caribbean Women's Fictions of History (Oxford, 2001). The daughter's search for "foremothers" in fiction by writers such as Morrison, Maryse Conde, and Jean Rhys.
• Martha Tuck Rozett, Constructing a World: Shakespeare's England and the New Historical Fiction (SUNY, 2002). Tries to define post-Name of the Rose historical fiction by examining Elizabethan novels in particular; the authors include Anthony Burgess, George Garrett, and Patricia Finney, among others. (Incidentally, I was somewhat depressed to see a typo in the back cover blurb, of all places.)
• Reiko Tachibana, Narrative as Counter-Memory: A Half-Century of Postwar Writing In Germany and Japan (SUNY, 1998). Fictional reinventions of WWII.