This Week's Acquisitions

(More free books this week.)

• May Sinclair, The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (Modern Library, 2003). The tragic effects of a late-Victorian upbringing on a young woman's self-consciousness.

  
  

• Clare A. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth Century British Literature (Rutgers, 1990). 19th c. medievalism, especially the afterlife of the Norman Conquest.

  
  

• Frederick Holmes, The Historical Imagination: Postmodernism and the Treatment of the Past in Contemporary British Fiction (ELS, 1997). New trends in historical fiction, with special attention to Ackroyd, Byatt, Fowles and Lively.

  
  

• David Patterson, The Shriek of Silence: A Phenomenology of the Holocaust Novel (Kentucky, 1992). Bakhtinian study, much of it devoted to Wiesel.

  
  

• Lawrence K. Langer, Preempting the Holocaust (Yale, 1998). A collection of essays on the afterlife of the Holocaust in fiction and other arts.

  
  

• Deborah Cartmell, I. Q. Hunter, and Imelda Whelehan, eds., Retrovision: Reinventing the Past in Film and Fiction (Pluto, 2001). More film than fiction; monarchy, Shakespeare, some SF.

  
  

• James Ogude, Ngugi's Novels and African History: Narrating the Nation (Pluto, 1999). Historical allegory, postcolonialism and Kenyan identity.

  
  

• Suzanne Keen, Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction (Toronto, 2001). The archive as a site for exploring issues of imperialism, the national past, the heritage industry, and so forth.

  
  

• Daniel Candel Bormann, The Articulation of Science in the Neo-Victorian Novel: A Poetics (and Two Case-Studies) (Peter Lang, 2002). Explores the competing rhetorics of science and history, with the "case studies" being Swift and Byatt.

  
  

• Mary Wilson Carpenter, Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies: Women, Sexuality, and Religion in the Victorian Market (Ohio, 2003). Explores the Victorian culture of "family Bibles" and its significance for contemporary literature.