By Kirby-Jane Hallum Kirby-Jane Hallum teaches English Literature at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Her research interests lie in the long 19th century in Britain and New Zealand, with particular focus on women’s and popular literature. Kirby-Jane’s monograph, Aestheticism and the Marriage Market in Victorian Popular Fiction: The Art of Female Beauty, is forthcoming from Pickering & Chatto in 2015, and she is currently embarking on a new project regarding Britain’s influence on colonial New Woman writing. Follow
Read moreTag: Book Reviews
The Martin Chuzzlewit Support Group (Part 2 of 2)
By Susan E. Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) and Elizabeth Coggin Womack (Penn State Brandywine) You can read part one here. Reading Discussion 4 (Serial Parts VII, VIII, and IX): In America (Can We Go Home Now?) Susan: Well, this section was a downer. To summarize, Dickens does not like America or Americans. Between Chapters 16 and 23, we learn that Americans: sustain a totally corrupt press, which regularly engages in forgery (Ch. 16); are either slave owners
Read more
The Martin Chuzzlewit Support Group (Part 1 of 2)
By Susan E. Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) and Elizabeth Coggin Womack (Penn State Brandywine) A book club can be an opportunity to share the joys of a literary experience with others. It can provide communal pathos, collective insight, and (depending on the group) tasty baked goods. a Our book club was not of that nature. a This fall, we decided to form a Martin Chuzzlewit reading support group, a virtual book club organized for the sole purpose
Read moreKnickerbockers and Tight-Lacing:Ruth Goodman’s ‘How To Be A Victorian’
‘How To Be A Victorian’ (Penguin/Viking, 2013) by Ruth Goodman review by Gabrielle Malcolm Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman, as the song goes. It was especially hard to be a Victorian woman. We think we know, and we certainly do – on many levels – understand the hardships that people underwent on a daily basis, from morning until night. But is this awareness not just one of academic, historic facts? Do we really appreciate or empathise with what
Read more‘That difficult thing, the liberal self’
The Foundation of the Unconscious: Schelling, Freud and the Birth of the Modern Psyche, by Matt ffytche, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, ix + 310 pp., £60.00 (hardback), ISBN 978 0 521 76649 4 Reviewev by Carolyn Burdett (Birkbeck, University of London) C.Burdett@bbk.ac.uk Unusually, this review of Matt ffytche’s book on the origins of the Freudian concept of the unconscious requires a word or two to justify its inclusion in this journal. The Foundation of the Unconscious is not primarily,
Read moreMusical Inspirations in the Long Nineteenth Century
British Music and Literary Context – Artistic Connections in the Long Nineteenth Century, by Michael Allis, Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2012, xii + 320 pages, illustrated, £60 (hardback), ISBN 9781843837305 Reviewed by Iain Quinn (Western Connecticut State University) ijtquinn1@yahoo.com This book offers an interdisciplinary examination of the relationship between literature and music during the long nineteenth century. Music and literature fulfill defined roles in British life with the paradox that, although Victorian literature has remained popular to the present day,
Read moreThe Past is Red: Some New Departures in the Historiography of Victorian Socialism
The Making of British Socialism, by Mark Bevir, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011, xiii + 350 pages, £24.95 (hardback), ISBN 0-691-15083-3 Ecology and the Literature of the British Left: The Red and the Green, edited by John Rignall and H. Gustav Klaus in association with Valentine Cunningham, Farnham: Ashgate, 2012, xi + 267, £60 (hardback), ISBN 1-4094-1822-1 William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880-1914, by Anna Vaninskaya, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, viii
Read more“Is there anybody there?” :Examining Victorian Responses to Spiritualism and the Occult
The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth Century Spiritualism and the Occult, by Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Willburn (eds.), Surrey: Ashgate, 2012, v + 436 pages, illustrated, £85 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-7546-6912-8 The Theology of Dracula: Reading the Book of Stoker as a Sacred Text, by Noel Montague-Etienne Rarignac, London: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2012, v +234 pages, illustrated, $40 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-7864-6499-9 Reviewed by Dr Clare Horrocks (Liverpool John Moores University) C.L.Horrocks@ljmu.ac.uk As the dust jacket of the Ashgate Companion notes,
Read moreReview: Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold
Girl in a Blue Dress, by Gaynor Arnold. Birmingham, Tindal Street Press: 2011 (2008), 438 pages, £7.99 paperback, ISBN 978-1-906994-15-0 “My husband’s funeral is today. And I’m sitting here alone in my upstairs room while half London followed him to his grave.” So begins Gaynor Arnold’s Girl in a Blue Dress, a novel which traces the story of Dorothea Gibson following the death of her estranged husband, famous author Alfred Gibson. Narrated from Dorothea’s perspective, the novel sees her look
Read moreBook Review: Bloody Victorians: Violence and Historical Narrative
Violent Victorians: Popular Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century London, by Rosalind Crone, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012, xv + 304 pages, illustrated, £16.99 (paperback), ISBN 978 0 7190 8685 4 Reviewed by Sara Hackenberg, San Francisco State University shackenb@sfsu.edu Sweeny Todd refuses to die. Ever since his 1846 debut in Lloyd’s sensational serial, The String of Pearls, the murderous barber of Fleet Street has been adapted countless times into literary, dramatic, cinematic, musical, and even balletic forms, most recently in Tim Burton’s
Read more