The Women Who Dared: A Biography of Amy Levy, by Christine Pullen, Kingston upon Thames: Kingston University Press, 2010, 241 pp., illustrated, ₤20 (paperback), ISBN 978 1 899999 43 9 Reviewed by Theodore M. Porter, University of California, Los Angeles The narrative trajectory of this biography begins and ends with the suicide of the writer Amy Levy at the age of 27 on 9 September 1889. That tragic end gives direction to Christine Pullen’s wide-ranging study of Levy and her
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Book Review: Victorian poetry when?
Victorian Poetry Now: Poets, Poems, Poetics, by Valentine Cunningham, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2011, xiii + 537 pp., £95 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-631-20826-6 Reviewed byEmma Mason, University of Warwick emma.mason@warwick.ac.uk From his work on dissenting religious traditions to the significance of intertextual writing and reading practices and the status of critical theory in literary studies, Valentine Cunningham has shaped for himself a scholarly guise at once robustly intellectual and critically jocose. His critical voice – homiletic and idiosyncratic – resonates with a
Read moreBook Review: Elite Dancing and Dining in London and Paris
Society Dancing: Fashionable Bodies in England, 1870-1920, by Theresa Jill Buckland, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, x + 200 pp., £50.00 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-230-27714-4 Bourgeois Consumption: Food, Space and Identity in London and Paris, 1850-1914, by Rachel Rich, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011, ix + 213 pp., £55.00 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-7190-8112-5 Reviewed by Dr Kelly Boyd, Institute of Historical Research, University of London k.boyd@blueyonder.co.uk As Leonore Davidoff showed us in The Best Circles, one of the most difficult tasks in nineteenth-century English
Read moreAre You a Believer Now?
Someone at the University of California, Davis was clearly taken with Steven Moffat’s second season of Sherlock. So much so that they took to participating in the #ibelieveinsherlockholmes meme, which Jeanette Laredo wrote about here for JVC Online about a month ago and which has taken to actions of world-wide street graffiti, like the ones at UC Davis pictured below and recorded on this tumblr. Now that the second season has aired in the United States as well as in
Read moreTransnational dialogues: Antoinette Burton and the rewritings of British imperial history
Empire in Question: Reading, Writing and Teaching British imperialism by Antoinette Burton, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011, 392 pp., £67.00 (hardback) ISBN: 978-0822348801; £16.99 (paperback) ISBN: 978-0822349020 For nearly twenty years Antoinette Burton has practiced and proselytised the ‘new imperial history’. Few interested readers will be unaware of Burton’s contribution to the field of British studies even if, as many of the essays reproduced here make clear, a fundamental objective of Burton’s work has been ‘displacing the nation
Read moreDickens and Mass Culture
Dickens and Mass Culture, by Juliet John, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, xii + 321 pp., £50.00 (hardback), ISBN: 987-0-19-925792-8 Dickens studies needs this book; the first to wrestle, in a detailed way, with Dickens’s strangely overlooked relationship with mass culture. Juliet John provides some complex answers to questions such as: What was the basis for Dickens’s extraordinary popularity? Why has it persisted from his age to ours? How have relationships with Dickens changed? What makes Dickens so translatable “across
Read moreFiction, Feeling, and Social Change
Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel, by Carolyn Betensky, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010, 224 pp., £33.95 (hardback), ISBN 0813930618 Victorian Social Activists’ Novels edited by Oliver Lovesay, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011, 4 Volume Set, 1456 pages, £350.00 (hardback), ISBN 978 1 85196 629 5 Is there inherent ethical value in feeling for, or with, the suffering of others? In Feeling for the Poor, Carolyn Betensky argues that Victorian novels about poverty
Read moreReview of William Oddie, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy
Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Makings of GKC, 1874-1908 by William Oddie, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, ix + 401 pp., £25 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-19-955165-1 Born in 1874, Gilbert Keith Chesterton is an important figure for those interested in the varied and cosmopolitan literary-cultural life of London at the end of the nineteenth century. At least he should be seen as an important figure. His development as an influential thinker and writer was shaped by engagement with a
Read moreReview of Muireann O’Cinneide, Aristocratic Women and the Literary Nation, 1832-1867
Aristocratic Women and the Literary Nation, 1832-1867 by Muireann O’Cinneide, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, vii + 241 pp., ₤45 (hardback), ISBN 0-230-54670-6 What would Victorian fiction be without the aristocratic woman? Everyone loves to hate her. Although more trendy recent criticism has spotlighted the wild colonial woman as foil for the Victorian heroine, the aristocratic woman has a longer villainous pedigree. As far back as Richardson’s Pamela, she did her best to wreck the heroine’s happiness. Beautiful, willful, selfish,
Read moreReview of Francis O’Gorman (ed.), Victorian Literature and Finance
Victorian Literature and Finance, edited by Francis O’Gorman, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, xii + 201 pp., £56 (hardback), ISBN 978 0 19 928192 3 At the end of nearly every year from 1998 through 2006, a period encompassing the swelling and bursting of one speculative bubble and the inflation of another, the New York Times awarded its Augustus Melmotte Memorial Prizes for particularly memorable “financial flubs and feats” from the preceding twelve months. The “feats” tend toward the jaw-dropping.
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