This Week's Acquisitions

(Almost entirely MLA swag loot books purchased at a steep discount.)

• Mary Ann Radcliffe, Manfroné; or, The One-Handed Monk (Valancourt, 2007).  Reprint of a Gothic novel first published in 1809.  Rape, murder, monks, usual drill.
• G. W. M. Reynolds, The Necromancer (Valancourt, 2007).  Reprint of a Gothic serial novel first issued in 1851-52.  The novel begins in the sixteenth century (featuring Bluff King Hal, no less).  Reynolds is best-known for The Mysteries of London, which you can read here. 
• Robert Mack, ed., Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Oxford, 2007).  Wins this year's prize for "Weirdest Movie Tie-In."  This is actually a critical edition of The String of Pearls, the penny dreadful which is the most important source for the Sweeney Todd legend.  Online version here. 
• Edith Wharton, The New York Stories of Edith Wharton (NYRB, 2007).  Amazingly, this is a collection of Wharton's stories set in NYC.
• Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts: A Novel (Canongate, 2007).  Man wakes up without his memory, must deal with inconvenient puzzles.
• Sherley A. Williams, Dessa Rose: A Novel (Harper, 1999).  A runaway slave finds unexpected help.  First published in 1986.
• Sarah Hall, Haweswater: A Novel (Harper, 2006).  Love and a projected dam cause a crisis in a tiny English village.  (Is there an English subgenre devoted to the effects of dams on villages? Both Robert Edric and Reginald Hill have written novels on this topic, and I'm sure there must be others.)
• Ian Duncan, Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton, 2007).  Scottish fiction before, after, influenced by Sir Walter Scott.
• Cornelia D. J. Pearsall, Tennyson's Rapture: Transformation in the Victorian Dramatic Monologue (Oxford, 2007).  Tennyson's dramatic monologues specifically, but Victorian dramatic monologues more generally.
• Michael J. Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation (Cambridge, 2006).  How Gothic conventions permeated Romanticism.
• Richard W. Schoch, Shakespeare's Victorian Stage: Performing History in the Theatre of Charles Kean (Cambridge, 2006).  Development of historically "accurate" stagings of the history plays.  There are some examples of Kean's "pictorial drama" at PeoplePlay UK and a photographic portrait of Kean at Picture History.
• Daniel E. White, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge, 2007).  Nonconformists and the shaping of Romanticism.
• Lee MacCormick Edwards, Herkomer: A Victorian Artist (Ashgate, 1999).  Study of the painter and illustrator Sir Hubert von Herkomer.  There are examples of his work at the National Portrait Gallery and the Victorian Web.