Jane Mattisson

Modernist Short Fiction by Women. The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf

Drewery, Claire. Modernist Short Fiction by Women. The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf (Farnham, Ashgate, 2011)

The Pleasures and Horrors of Eating: The Cultural History of Eating in Anglophone Literature

The Pleasures and Horrors of Eating adopts a binary approach to eating and food, and their relations to all areas of human life, religion, eroticism and death, contrasting the images, rhetoric and ...

Dickens's London : perception, subjectivity and phenomenal urban multiplicity

world that they come to inhabit” (p. 55). What makes Cox’s book singular and worth reading is that it offers a strange combination of provocative and intriguing (sometimes even speculative) readings of and a wealth of useful information on both the canonical writers and the minor poets, the latter of which—Holcroft, Barbauld and Hunt—tend to be forgotten due to the supremacy of the big six male Romantic poets. But it is not only the new light that Cox sheds on a variety of big and small Romantics that makes the book delightful to read, it is also the daringly cross-grained interpretations (more often than not losing the golden thread of the war theme) that make the book both outstanding and controversial. One of these is the widened and blurry scope of the genre satire; which, according to Cox, encompasses Barbauld’s poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (“a generic hybrid”, p. 113) and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, especially when the latter is said “to bring an element of satire into what is also an attempt to recreate Greek tragedy” (p. 141). Although it is very hard to detect the satirical element in these two poems and even harder to see the link with the Napoleonic wars, the chapters (and the rich context they supply) are enjoyable to read and trigger a long chain of ideas and associations. Another hypothesis is even more daring and tenuous: the vivid interest that the Cockneys take in Italian culture, and particularly in its eroticism, is, for Cox, not only “a response to a world of war” (p. 199), but also a cross-cultural borrowing, a ransacking of cosmopolitan culture that eventually leaves the debris of tradition and national literature behind (p. 208). Viewed from this point of view, Shakespeare’s eclectic forays into Italian culture in Othello, Romeo and Juliet and other plays would clearly be expressions of belligerence; and if we took up Cox’s cue, would not all forms of intertextuality finally be signs of war and would not then the entire canon of world literature have to be reduced to being a negligible sideeffect of war and plunder? Cox himself inadvertently refutes this argument when his elegant analyses show that Romantic literature existed in its own right, irrespective of the shadows of war.

Ritual and the Idea of Europe in Interwar Writing

arguments which expose one’s secret shames. The picture is most unpleasant. I would say that the ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is self-examination written as a novel but unlike other such works, which are generally dreary and self-pitying, this, because it is by Mr Waugh, is readable, thrilling and detached” (p. 93). Probably the most significant feature of Lovely Bits of Old England is its selection of articles from Betjeman’s “Men and Buildings” series. Appearing monthly between 1958 and 1964, these extended pieces, comprising some of his best journalistic output, allowed Betjeman the time and column space to ruminate on such subjects as country houses, railway stations, town halls, bridges, churchyards, public memorials and contemporary architecture, and to inveigh against the spoliation of the England he loved so much: “Just because we live in noise and speed and constant change what remains on this island of quietude, slowness and permanence becomes increasingly precious” (p. 103). While Lovely Bits does make a welcome contribution to our understanding of Betjeman, this would have been a better and more useful collection had Fuller foregone the insipid book reviews and anthologized only the architectural writing—and especially had he included the complete “Men and Buildings” series.

Race, Empire and First World War Writing

Santanu Das (ed.). Race, Empire and First World War Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)

Robinson, Alan. Narrating the Past. Historiography, Memory and the Contemporary Novel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

that at first glance does not strike the reader as particularly DeLillo-esque, but becomes inescapable after completing this book: “these three novels interrogate all notions of national identity” (p. 8). Josephine Gattuso Hendin’s entry on Underworld illuminates Olster’s statement: for DeLillo, identity in the new millennium represents “a more complex search for shared affinities... a reconciliation of opposites” for a post-Cold War society that has “surpassed the world of either/or [and] joined the realm of both/and” (p. 100). This collection embodies Hendin’s statement in its “both/and” associative approach and in its lasting relevance. By relating close textual analysis to concepts such as performance art, ethnicity and globalization, the book provides DeLillo’s ideas the space to radiate outward, incorporating as many connections as can be sustained. At its best, this synthesis emulates the stimulating nature of DeLillo’s fiction, alluding to greater revelations and links for the reader to discover; however, the “both/and” approach also prevents the less conclusive essays from cohering fully. Nevertheless, the book immerses the reader in a panoramic vision of DeLillo’s millennial America and convincingly positions DeLillo as a “waste engineer at the controls of a front loader piling up” America’s “pervasive” cultural material—highbrow and trash (both literal and otherwise)—through the theoretical, the political and the personal in a search for “the most effective aesthetic vehicles in conveying consciousness” in an increasingly commodified world where “words alone may just not be enough” (pp. 78, 13). This results in a collection greater than the sum of its parts. The later essays, particularly those on Falling Man, benefit from the work that comes before them, and others would suffer if made to stand alone; however, the reward for the reader who looks at the full work justifies this risk on the part of Olster, for one puts this book down with his/her attention where it belongs: not on the power of one particular essay but rather on the body of work that these essays seek to describe.Robinson, Alan. Narrating the Past. Historiography, Memory and the Contemporary Novel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

Engendering Genre: The Works of Margaret Atwood

Nischik, Reingard M. Engendering Genre: The Works of Margaret Atwood (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2009)

Ridicule, Religion and the Politics of Wit in Augustan England

Lund, Roger D. Ridicule, Religion and the Politics of Wit in Augustan England (Farnham, Ashgate, 2012)

Joseph Conrad and the Swan Song of Romance

Baxter, Katherine Isobel. Joseph Conrad and the Swan Song of Romance (Farnham, Ashgate, 2010)

Front Lines of Modernism: Remapping the Great War in British Fiction

Duckworth, her death and Stephen’s own death in 1904. Much of this volume depends upon Anne’s own journal, compiled from earlier diaries and later accounts from her memory. This process suggests, as Aplin acknowledges, that the journal is not an always reliable source; however, he uses the material carefully and avoids unwarranted speculation. An important example of his control is his account of the intimacy between Richmond Ritchie and Eleanor Tennyson after the death of her husband Lionel. Winifred Gérin, in Anne Thackeray Ritchie (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1983), claims that Eleanor and Richmond “fell mutually in love” (p. 241) and that Anne sent Richmond to Brighton to choose between herself and Eleanor (p. 215). Aplin disputes this, explaining, “there is no evidence that Annie sent him off to Brighton to decide between herself and Eleanor, and that ‘he sent her a laconic card’ [quoting Gérin] choosing her. There is no card, no record of a Brighton visit” (Memory, p. 85). Aplin sees the episode rather as an intelligent Richmond, used to thinking things through, becoming aware of the dangers of intimacy and pulling back. A less controversial revision, in which Anne’s journal proves to be invaluable, is tracing the inception and development of the Biographical (later Centenary) Edition of Thackeray’s works. Anne’s own account shows that the edition was her desire, and that Smith and Elder were spurred to publication by the prospect of a US edition by Harper coming beforehand. Anne first broached the idea to Smith in 1892 and the first volumes were published in 1898. During this period and after, Anne’s daughter Hester became increasingly important as an amanuensis, while Anne and Richmond rejoiced in son Billy’s family—including daughter Belinda. The family history thus ends with an appropriate circling back to the keeper of the Thackeray papers who made possible this vivid realization of the Thackeray circle.