This Week's Acquisitions
- Rather too many plays, mainly farces and melodramas, to list here (thirty-six, to be exact); many of them are 1834 editions from Duncombe's British Theatre series, with the earliest from 1813. The authors include Thomas Dibdin, Thomas Holcroft, and Elizabeth Inchbald. (One Green Horse)
- Karl Kahlert, The Necromancer, ed. Jeffrey Cass (Valancourt, 2007). New edition of 1794 novel originally published in Germany; singled out in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. (Amazon)
- William Combe, The English Dance of Death and The Dance of Life, 3 vols. (Methuen, 1903). Reprint of Combe's verse danse macabre and its more optimistic (but still satirical) counterpart, set to plates by the caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson. Originally published 1815-17. Combe is best known as the author of the Doctor Syntax series (which would make a great pseudonym or name for a blog, incidentally...), another collaboration with Rowlandson. (One Green Horse)
- Steve Erickson, Zeroville (Europa, 2007). The 60s and 70s as experienced by a man whose life is consumed by cinema. (One Green Horse)
- Diana Wallace, The Woman's Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900-2000 (Palgrave, 2008). Gender and the practice of historical fiction, both "high" (Byatt) and "low" (Cookson). (Amazon [secondhand])
- Brian Hamnett, The Historical Novel in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Representations of Reality in History & Fiction (Oxford, 2011). New history of the historical novel from a Continental perspective. I'm reviewing this for Choice. (Review copy)
- Isaac Taylor, Ancient Christianity and the Doctrines of the Oxford Tracts (Herman Hooker, 1840). US reprint of the 1839 original, which focuses on the implications of celibacy. (eBay)
- Percy MacQuoid, A History of English Furniture (Bracken, 1988). Coffee-table size omnibus edition of MacQuoid's multivolume history from 1905. (Gift)
- John Wardroper, The Caricatures of George Cruikshank (Godine, 1978). Collection of one of the nineteenth century's major caricaturists and illustrators. (Gift)