Book Reviews (15.1)

Jacky Bratton on Jennifer Hall-Wit’s Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780-1880 (Durham, New Hampshire: University of New Hampshire Press, 2007). To read the full review, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=1&spage=164. Charlotte Mitchell on Gavin Budge’s Charlotte M. Yonge: Religion, Feminism and Realism in the Victorian Novel (Oxford, Bern & Peter Lang, 2007). To read the full review, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=1&spage=158. Donna Loftus on James Taylor’s Creating Capitalism. Joint-Stock Enterprise in British Politics and Culture 1800-1870 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Royal Historical Society

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Elaine Freedgood, ‘What Objects Know: Circulation, Omniscience and the Comedy of Dispossession in Victorian It-Narratives’

In JVC 15.1, Elaine Freedgood examines Victorian it-narratives – stories related by talking umbrellas, feathers, and dolls. What lessons did these speaking objects impart to readers, and what do these stories tell us about how Victorians imagined what it meant to be a narrator, a person, a possession and a subject? To read the full article, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=1&spage=83. Click here to enjoy it as a narrative  – Richard H. Horne’s Memoirs of a London Doll (1855)

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Supriya Chaudhuri, ‘Phantasmagorias of the Interior: Furniture, Modernity, and Early Bengali Fiction’

The Bengali novel, Supriya Chaudhuri finds in JVC 15.1, housed suspicion and distrust of European furnishings and the bourgeois individual that collected them. In the fiction of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), this distrust manifests itself in a rejection of the bourgeois interior and a questioning of the very tools of realist representation. Yet Chaudhuri finds similarities as well as differences between the early Bengali novel and the classic realist experiment, for both shared a horror of fussy, over-stuffed apartments and the

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