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Volume 23 | Number 3 Article 1
Summer 2014 Volume 23, Number 3
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SHARP News Volume 23, Number 3 Summer 2014
discussion of Random House’s first (author- Smith College offered a response to the three Conference Report ized) American publication of James Joyce’s papers, drawing them together and pointing Ulysses. Nielsen revisited the contemporary out resonances that the panelists themselves controversy about Samuel Roth’s “pirate” may not have seen. publication of the novel in his Two Worlds Lise Jaillant organized the final SHARP- SHARP at the Monthly and showed how that flap (and the sponsored session, “Book History and 129th MLA Annual Convention copyright problems that allowed Roth to print Digital Humanities.” Six presenters – Greg Chicago Ulysses) influenced Bennett Cerf ’s design of Hickman, Michael Gavin, Andrew Stauffer, 9–12 January 2014 his edition and inclusion of such paratexts as Matthew Lavin, Hannah McGregor, and Eliz- a foreword by attorney Morris Ernst, Judge abeth Wilson-Gordon – offered stimulating SHARP, whose affiliate-organization status Woolsey’s decision, and a letter by Joyce au- looks at digital projects whose focus spanned with the Modern Language Association was thorizing the edition. from the age of incunabula to the twentieth renewed for another seven years, sponsored In recent years SHARP has partnered with century and whose methodologies often three panels at the 2014 Modern Language other MLA affiliate organizations to present invoked the next generation of the digital if Association conference. Typical of SHARP, joint panels. This year the International Vir- not bibliographical, too. Full details of the the panels’ topics stretched from the earliest ginia Woolf Society teamed up with SHARP roundtable appear in an Early Modern Online days of printing to twenty-first-century digital to offer three papers on “Woolf and Book Bibliography post (
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As some of you will know, SHARP mem- SHARP News The Prez Speaks ber Susan Pickford has been chairing a com- mittee that is looking to translate key articles editor on book history for the benefit of members. Sydney Shep, Wai-te-ata Press I’m writing this in mid-June – the end The first stage of the project, to be unveiled Victoria University of Wellington of the academic year for British universities at Antwerp, is the translation into English of PO Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand 6140 and for many elsewhere in Europe – and, by a selection of articles from French, German, [email protected] the time you read this, our twenty-second Dutch, Hebrew, Japanese, and Chinese. The annual conference in Antwerp will be all but committee is also exploring potential future Editorial Assistant – 23.3 upon us, if not actually passed. Indeed, the directions, including publishing monographs Sara Bryan Call for Papers for the 2015 conference, to and setting up an online journal for special Publication Assistant, Wai-te-ata Press be held in Longueuil & Montréal, Canada, issues on specific themes. A roundtable on will have been issued, and many of you will SHARP and translation will be held at Ant- already be thinking about possible proposals. werp, and all members are warmly welcomed review Editors to attend. The committee itself covers major Joanna Howe, Books – Europe When you come to do so, you should find the online software system to be very similar to European languages as well as Sanskrit, Bath Spa University, UK that used for Antwerp, but there will be one Croatian, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, [email protected] Korean, Hindi, and Bengali, but Susan is keen Millie Jackson, Books – Americas key difference: the software will be hosted and maintained by SHARP rather than the to hear from people with knowledge of other University of Alabama, AL, USA host institution. The selection process will languages (including Scandinavian languages, [email protected] which are a gap at the moment):
Applications weeks at the Rare Book School summer Fellowships Applications should reach the Deputy session in a position combining staff duties Librarian’s PA, Cambridge University Library, with the opportunity to take an RBS course West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DR, UK by focusing on Americana themes. 31 October 2014. An election will be made The fellowship offered by Crystal Bridges Munby Fellowship in in early January 2015. Applications should Museum also differs. It supports a high Bibliography 2015–2016 include: school teacher enhancing their knowledge Cambridge University Library A completed application cover sheet, avail- of the printed visual arts and print culture to able from
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of Fabiola, another early Christian story with letter’s function purely that of an aide-memoire, Book Reviews obvious Reformation and contemporary to accompany and not to substitute for oral implications, gets a single entry – without communication; but these same myths already reference to his novels. Mrs Humphry Ward’s warn of the dangers to the faculty of memory Miriam Elizabeth Burstein. Victorian Reforma- Helbeck of Banisdale is also missing. Perhaps posed by the invention of this new technol- tions: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, even more surprising is the total omission ogy – a warning all the more pertinent in the 1820–1900. Notre Dame, IN: University of of Sybil, by the Anglican Jew Disraeli, with age of instant written communication. Notre Dame Press, 2014. x, 302p. ISBN: its opening disquisition on the tragedy of the Paola Ceccarelli’s monumental study of 9780268022389. US $39 (paperback). destruction of the monasteries and the crea- the origins and forms of the letter in ancient tion of the “two nations”: rich and poor. Greek culture has been long in the making, A primary feature of Victorian fiction was Nor is the selection of novels supported but well worth the wait. She writes (v) that its passion for re-fighting the battles of the by any clear intellectual or theological struc- the project arose from an interest in the cor- Reformation from 300 years earlier. For many ture. Burstein carefully avoids taking sides, respondence of the Seleucid kings, but that Protestants, the Catholic Emancipation Act but her history is fairly simplistic: she as- the need to understand the context of these (1829) and the subsequent re-establishment sumes that the Tests Acts kept Catholics and letters expanded the scope of the project of the Catholic hierarchy (1850) meant that Dissenters out of public life until repealed in several directions, thanks to the complex Rome was once more an ever-present threat in 1828–29, when in fact they had in many traditions surrounding the origins of letter in their own time. For many Catholics, the cases been unenforced for generations (119). writing and of literacy itself, and because only destruction of the monasteries and with them Anglicans and Evangelicals are referred to as non-epistolary texts can give us a context for of Catholic England (“merrie” or miserable if they were entirely separate groups. ancient epistolary communication, by por- to taste) was an historical impoverishment and The style will irritate many: each chapter traying senders, recipients, and their actions – perhaps even more serious – the wrench- begins with what it is going to tell us, then tells pre- and post-script. The book is therefore ing of an entire country away from its true it, then tells us again what we have been told impressive in its range, both chronologically future course. – the Army “weapons drill”. The writing itself – from the earliest reference to a written To support this thesis (and this is, one sus- is scattered with malapropisms and clichés; message, in Homer’s Iliad, to the second pects, a doctoral thesis) Burstein cites an enor- “disinterested” is confused with “uninter- century BCE – and, especially, in the texts mous number of now unknown Victorian ested” (139), and on one occasion we get the it treats. These include real letters preserved novelists (mostly women) who deal with the amazing word “prophesizes” (188). For those in civic inscriptions, on lead tablets, and Reformation from every conceivable angle, as prepared to wade through it, there are useful on papyrus, as well as those transmitted in well as a few better-known writers: Scott (The references to a huge quantity of long out- literary manuscripts; real and fictional letters Abbott and The Monastery), Dickens (Barnaby of-print novels and forgotten writers, some quoted in literary texts from Herodotus and Rudge), and George Eliot (Romola). While, in of whom may indeed be worth resurrecting. Thucydides, via Greek tragedy and comedy, to effect, she makes her case by sheer quantity, But whether this really opens up a vital lost orators such as Demosthenes and Isocrates; there is something less effective about the Victorian debate is doubtful. and numerous texts discussing the origin of quality. While one hesitates to describe the epistolary communication and of written novels named above as a major writers’ B-list, Stephen Prickett communication in general. they are not among their authors’ most-read University of Glasgow, University of Kent Before examining these different kinds of today. Finding those who have even heard text and their implications, chronologically of the rest would be difficult. More disturb- c and further divided by genre, (this procedure ing are the omissions. Newman – surely a structuring the majority of the work), the central figure in any Catholic/Protestant practicalities of letter writing and sending in debate – gets only cursory mention, and E. C. Paola Ceccarelli. Ancient Greek Letter Writing: the Greek world, especially difficult in the ear- Agnew’s novel Geraldine: A Tale of Conscience A Cultural History (600–150 BC). Oxford: Ox- lier centuries covered, are explained (chapter (reviewed by Newman as “bad characteriza- ford University Press, 2013. xx, 444p., w/map. 1). The idea of epistolary writing as a genre, tion, simplistic theology, and poor history”) ISBN 9780199675593. £95 (hardback). with its familiar conventions and formulaic was, we are told, more famous, and “arguably greetings and addresses, is then convincingly far more influential,” than Newman’sLoss and Early on, Greek culture developed a com- demonstrated to arise only around the mid- Gain (169). plex and contradictory set of assertions about fourth century BCE, by comparison with Though no one doubts the existence of letters. They are inherently truthful, personal, other early forms of written communication a “Reformation debate” in the nineteenth and intimate (a window to the writer’s soul, (chapter 2). Early attitudes to writing and century, it is surely eccentric to locate it pri- one side of a dialogue), but inherently un- epistolary communication are then surveyed marily among less famous works when it is trustworthy and deceitful (many of the earli- (chapter 3), showing that there was an over- omnipresent. Though Loss and Gain receives est representations of letter writing, from the whelmingly negative connotation to letters in cursory mention, there is none of Newman’s Iliad to tragedies such as Euripides’ Hippolytus, discussions and representations of them in other conversion novel, Callista. His most fa- show letters being used to deceive their re- the archaic and classical periods, before their mous antagonist, Charles Kingsley, author of cipient). Early myths about the invention of official use in the Hellenistic kingdoms (far the ferociously anti-Catholic novel, Hypatia, is epistolary communication, often portrayed larger and thus more bureaucratic political never even named. Cardinal Wiseman, author as the invention of writing itself, make the structures than classical city-states) became https://scholarworks.umass.edu/sharp_news/vol23/iss3/1 4 et al.: Volume 23, Number 3 SHARP News Vol. 23, no. 3 Summer 2014 d
so frequent that it became impossible to see to determine how earlier texts were received Prescott’s work is unmissable: a tour de force them as marked in this way. by readers and writers. Don Skemer provides of palaeographical and historical expertise, While Ceccarelli’s primary aim is to elu- a thorough study and edition of Princeton engagingly written. cidate the contexts for official and political University Library, Princeton 57, a genealogi- A. S. G. Edwards has the last word, look- correspondence such as letters between kings cal roll with an ex libris indicating ownership ing forward to “Directions in the study of and city councils or between cities, letters by one Frater Richard Bury. English manuscripts, c. 1200–c. 1350,” which, between individuals and correspondence on In the only art historical piece in the he suggests, might include more concerted more private matters are also examined in de- volume, Lucy Freeman Sandler examines work on individual manuscripts and an in- tail as part of this contextualizing process. In the construction and marginal illustration in creased attention to centers of production. short, no letter, nor reference to letter writing (the possibly Oxford manuscript) New York, Rightly calling for renewed attention to in the Greek world (including the influence Pierpont Morgan Library M. 761, a thirteenth- what we think we know, Edwards effectively of, and interaction with, non-Greek cultures), century manifestation of Pierre D’Abernon reminds scholars of the need to question is overlooked, meaning that this book will of Fetcham’s La Lumere as lais. The highly everything systematically, as a number of henceforth be crucial for all research on entertaining drawings, apparently added by the essays in this very useful volume indeed epistolary writing in the Greek world, and for the scribe as the manuscript was corrected, exemplify. many studies of letters in contemporary non- are interpreted perceptively as not only direct Elaine Treharne Greek cultures and in the Roman Empire. commentaries on the adjacent text, but also Stanford University, California as amplification and explication – as author- Owen Hodkinson ship, essentially. c University of Leeds Authorship also concerns Philip A. Shaw in his essay on the attribution of the Metrical c Chronicle to “Robert of Gloucester.” Here, Stephan Füssel, ed. Gutenberg-Jahrbuch Shaw argues for a detailed examination of the 2013. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2013. manuscript tradition, the better to discern the 304p., ill,. with 8 b/w and col. plates. ISBN A. S. G. Edwards and Orietta Da Rold, eds. seemingly close relationship between a reviser 9783447069175. €75 (hardback). English Manuscripts Before 1400. (English Manu- of the South English Legendary and the Chroni- script Studies 1100–1700, vol. 17). London: cle’s complex composition and transmission. The intellectual and visual excitement of The British Library, 2012. vi, 302p., ill. ISBN Complexity involving the Metrical Chronicle also each issue of the Gutenberg-Jahrbuch lies largely 9780712358835. £50 / US $75 (hardback). concerns Jennifer Jahner in her investigation in the opportunities to learn more about an of political poetry emerging from the Second aspect of book history with which one is Together with an auction-house report by Barons’ War (1264–67). Most of this poetry already familiar and to learn in some depth A. S. G. Edwards for 2010, this volume con- – such as that in London, British Library, Add. about others which are outside one’s area of tains thirteen essays that examine manuscripts 23986 and Harley 978 – is driven by “baronial expertise. In this issue these two pleasures are and documents principally from 1150 to 1400. sympathies” (203) and illustrates a multitude represented for me by Jonathan Green and As the book-jacket briefly suggests, these es- of forms, a breadth of potential audience, and Oliver Duntze’s investigation of the earliest says independently but consistently elucidate a precise codicological contextualization. In German prognostications and by Graham the multilingualism and multiculturalism of terms of codicology, Erik Kwakkel offers an Shaw’s elucidation of the East India Compa- the high Middle Ages in England. important collation of evidence for the use ny’s role in the globalisation of the English George Younge, continuing his outstand- of “discarded parchment as writing support.” book and book-trade. ing work on post-Conquest manuscript This widespread phenomenon demonstrates The ephemeral nature of almanacs makes production, closely evaluates the contents of the desire to economize – something Kwakkel their survival problematic, as they are de- the Canterbury, Christ Church manuscript, attributes to the mid-fourteenth century (255), signed to be read closely before being cast London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian D. though it is a feature of manuscript produc- aside the following year. First printed in the xiv, to suggest that it might have functioned tion seen much earlier, too, of course. 1470s, many of these must have disappeared as an instructional book for those engaged Two further essays, one by Andrew Prescott entirely. Examining a fragment now in the in pastoral care, or for a closer audience of and the other by Mark Chambers and Louise State Library in Berlin, the authors affirm monastic conversi. Michael Gullick attempts Sylvester, examine administrative documents. the printer to be Johann Sensenschmidt, who to analyze writing in English at Canterbury, The latter piece utilizes a range of material in worked in Nuremberg from 1473 to 1478/9. Christ Church in the earlier twelfth century, the often-multilingual accounts of the Royal By availing themselves of bibliographical but does so with an unhelpful insistence on Wardrobe and petitions to the king in order to databases, digitisation projects, and online the “decline” of the vernacular, when in fact assess late-medieval lexis for dress and textiles. reference works, they attribute the author- we lack the sustained evidence for such an The significance of this kind of administra- ship to Johannes von Glogau and the year assertion. D. A. Woodman, Aidan Conti, and tive record for an increased understanding of of forecast to be 1478, before they go on Kathryn A. Lowe each tackle the transmission medieval language and literacy is part of the to compare the Berlin fragment with the and understanding of the Anglo-Saxon past picture discussed in Prescott’s demonstration structure of subsequent practica written by in their essays, focusing respectively on the of why scholars should appreciate the work Glogau. Beverley Cartulary, on Cambridge, Trinity B. of the large cadre of professional scribes in Shaw’s contribution updates and expands 14. 52, and on a Bury St Edmunds’ charter the various bodies of government. As always, on some aspects of work he has already ... / 6
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... / 5 published. He shows that the presence of the hundred volumes which were acquired later Sean Grass. Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual English book in India and elsewhere in the by the scholarly Bishop of Vienna, Johannes Friend: A Publishing History. Burlington, VT East goes back to the early decades of the sev- Fabri (1478–1541). and Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014. xiv, 274 p. enteenth century largely thanks to the trading Kirsten Krumeich studies a fragmentary ill. (w/16 col. plates). ISBN: 9780754669302. activities of the East India Company. English incunable from Goethe’s private library, that £65 (hardback). books in the East had modest beginnings, but of Fasciculus medicinae (Venice: de Gregoriis, by the late eighteenth century they were being 1495), which lies hidden in Hans Ruppert’s Henry James, then just a young writer made more widely available through auctions catalogue. The imprint was the fifth edition out to make a name for himself, did not of the property of deceased owners. Of of this popular, richly illustrated medical like Charles Dickens’s last complete novel. greater importance in this development was compendium, which went through eight edi- As he reported in his 21 December 1865 the Company’s policy of shipping devotional tions in the incunable period alone, four Latin review for The Nation, he found it too loose, titles, and later, practical works on navigation editions and four translations into Italian and baggy, disorganized, sentimental, and (as and medicine, a trade which expanded greatly Spanish. The typographical layout of the Elizabeth Gaskell would say) “Dickensey.” in the second half of the eighteenth century. 1495 edition is important in being set in the It was, he contended, lacking in subtlety of While this can be explained by the increase Rotunda type, like the first edition of 1491, characterization, and relied too heavily on in book production in that period, it was also but the Italian translation of 1493 was set in whimsical caricature and superficial analysis due to the change of status and direction of the still new humanist Antiqua type. of motivation. In short, it was everything the Company from a multinational trading Hans Sachs’ Klagrede deutschen Landes sur- that James felt a Dickens tended to be, but company to a key player in Indian politics. vives only in a single copy in the Bavarian what a novel should not be; in his unhesitat- As the resident British population in India State Library. Though 1546 has been accepted ing pronouncement, the subject of Grass’s grew, books were shipped increasingly as until now as the correct date of printing, it introduction, it was “the poorest of Mr. speculative cargo. Private correspondence of was ascribed to the workshop of Georg Mer- Dickens’s works.” As Grass observes, sub- high-placed individuals gives us a good insight ckel in Nürnberg, who did not begin printing sequent generations of critics and scholars into their often wide reading. Some informa- until 1552. Detailed analysis of the printing have uncritically accepted James’s judgement: tion on how these books were acquired is types shows that the Klagrede was printed at “This is an enormous shame,” he writes, “for supplied by Shaw, who estimates that by 1800 Augsburg by Hans Gegler probably ca. 1556. Our Mutual Friend is certainly one of Dickens’s there must have been one hundred thousand Gisela Möncke argues that we must date most profoundly thoughtful and deliberately volumes of British books in India, mostly in the printing of the work to 1558 and that it artistic books” (2). private ownership. was instigated by the Augsburg bookseller Grass’s book provides an unprecedented A new feature of the Jahrbuch examines and publisher, Georg Willer, who had close insight into the chequered history of Our the growth and diversity of book and print- business ties with Gegler. The changes in Mutual Friend – one of the most significant ing museums in Europe. The Lyons Printing administration in place at the end of the Sch- novels in the Dickens canon. The appendi- Museum’s Director, Alan Marshall, describes malkaldic War (1546–1547) imposed greater ces in particular, which include a reprinting its origins and aims. The city had been a centre compliance with censorship laws on members of all known contemporary reviews of the of European printing and book trades in the of the book trade in Augsburg. novel, are indispensable to those who wish fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The driving Helmut Claus examines the work of the to understand the novel’s reception in Britain force behind the Museum’s establishment was Slovenian author and Reformer, Primož and America. The story of the inception and members of the Audin family, who combined Trubar, particularly in relation to the imprint, reception of the novel is worth reading cover close involvement in the printing industry ‘Gedruckt in Siebenbürgen durch Jernei to cover. It includes such appended materials with a strong commitment to museums. Skuryaniz.’ By a careful analysis of types he as Dickens’s own (albeit, rather oblique) state- Shortly after its establishment, in 1957, the assigns Tubar’s Cathechismus and Abecedarium ment regarding his separation from his wife Museum developed a strong link with Lyons (both printed in 1550) to the workshop of of over twenty years, Catherine (The Times, City Library. Reflecting its museographic Ulrich Morhart I in Tübingen. 7 June 1858) and the novelist’s involvement origins, the Museum’s collections tend to be The visual excitement engendered by in the Staplehurst railway accident in 1865, representative rather than extensive. each issue of the Jahrbuch is due yet again to significant with regard to Our Mutual Friend András Németh discusses the key role the expertise of the publisher, Harrassowitz since the manuscript was in the railway car played by the humanist Johannes Alexander Verlag. with him and the Ternans at the time. Brassicanus (1500–1539) in the transfer The values of the age as reflected in such of Greek and Latin manuscripts from the W. A. Kelly contemporary reviews exalt a Dickens who Hungarian royal library to Vienna, which he Edinburgh Napier University became less than fashionable by the end incorporated into his growing library. Later, of the century, but recall for us today his several of them served as exemplars of the incredibly broadly-based appeal as a writer first printing made available to European of fiction in the early and mid-Victorian pe- scholars. Németh uses Brassicanus’ bequest riods. Grass’s interesting work on reception, inventory as the basis of this study, sup- mandatory reading for anybody who intends plemented by Brassicanus’ annotations, etc., to teach Our Mutual Friend, includes chapters to reconstruct his library. An estimate of its on the “remaking” of Dickens (chapter 1); the size can be gathered from more than thirteen writing of Our Mutual Friend (chapter 2); the https://scholarworks.umass.edu/sharp_news/vol23/iss3/1 6 et al.: Volume 23, Number 3 SHARP News Vol. 23, no. 3 Summer 2014 d
book in the marketplace (chapter 3); Victorian natural development” (cited in Grass, 97). This is particularly helpful and treats authors critics (chapter 4); and the book since 1870 is a book for which Forster had tremendous often ignored (Oldys, Birch, Ralph). More (chapter 5). This review cannot do justice to respect – but as a lover of the early Dickens might have been made of the high degree the complex thread of Grass’s argument, and he could not warm to it. Sean Grass leaves of anonymous publication, but emphasis so focuses on just a few of his key points. his reader to surmise that Forster’s judgment, on the concept of the “professed author” is Should we take Chapman and Hall’s loss like that of Henry James, was fundamentally extremely helpful. of money on the book as confirmation that flawed. Griffin’s emphasis favors poetry. Fiction in the judgment of the reading public, too, Philip Allingham comes up en passant, but plays almost not at this was Dickens’s weakest performance to Lakehead University, ON, Canada all. More remains to be done in that realm: date? To counter this misperception, Grass surviving account books tell us quite a lot examines the publisher’s balance sheet, as about what playwrights earned in the theatre. well as contemporary responses other than c Griffin makes it crystal clear that “writing for James’s. He observes that, given its overall money” is a critical component of what de- positive reception, Our Mutual Friend is not a fines the “author by profession” as opposed lesser novel requiring resurrection, because Dustin Griffin.Authorship in the Long Eighteenth to the “traditional models” of the learned it never died. As we can see in the 83-page Century. Newark, DE: University of Delaware man who writes for fame or the gentleman appendix containing 41 early reviews of the Press, 2014. x, 212p. ISBN 9781611494709. who writes for pleasure. The reader naturally novel, it was received at the time as a wor- £44.95 / US $70 (hardback). wants to know: “How much money?” We need thy addition to the Dickens canon. A hard to know both sums and buying power. In the bargainer in his later career, Dickens wrung How does the concept of ‘author’ change later eighteenth century a mainpiece brought from Chapman and Hall some £6,000 for between the mid-seventeenth century and the the playwright 100 guineas for copyright at half-copyright, eventually leaving the firm early nineteenth? The ‘Tory’ narrative of de- a time when the average rate per volume for with a net loss of £700 (to which its extensive cline to which Pope is central laments the dis- ordinary novels was only about £11. Grif- advertising campaign and overprinting of the placement of leisured gentlemen and scholars fin might usefully have gone to the Upcott opening numbers likely contributed). But that by paid hacks. The ‘Whig’ narrative celebrates Collection of copyright sales, the Robinson loss is the beginning rather than the end of liberation, emancipation, and progress: the archive, Nichols’ figures for Lintott, or even the story: “By not haggling over the price, professional writer escapes the bondage of the just the figures reported for novels in the Frederic Chapman kept Dickens happy and patronage system. Both master narratives are Garside-Raven-Schöwerling Bibliographical Survey so secured his continued cooperation for any misleading oversimplifications, as Dustin Grif- of Prose Fiction, but he is more concerned new works, the People’s edition, and nearly fin demonstrates in this lucid reconsideration with the concept of authorship than with £10,000 of back stock, as well as for the im- of chaotic and conflicting evidence. the details of money earned. His focus is on mensely profitable Charles Dickens edition of Griffin efficiently reviews the perspectival genteel authorship rather than Grub Street, his works that they brought out beginning in differences to be found in New Criticism, but he does demonstrate that supporting 1867” (75). Chapman and Hall lost a little to structuralism, poststructuralism, New Histori- oneself entirely by writing was a hard-slog ensure profits in the long term. cism, book history, Habermas/public sphere, proposition. Grass’s narrative of the publishing history, print culture studies, the ‘literary marketplace’, This is an important book. It politely compelling in its evidence, omits only the re- and copyright history. All have virtues, but debunks selective and partisan accounts of ception of Marcus Stone’s illustrations, which each imposes distortions. Griffin looks at the tidy “rise of the professional author” gave the novel a sixties look (although he particular cases (Milton, Dryden, Gray), but that supposedly occurred after the passage discusses the evolution of the monthly wrap- seven of eleven chapters are conceptual (e.g., of the 1710 Copyright Act. Professionaliza- per in some depth). Everybody recognized ‘Collaboration,’ ‘Social World,’ ‘Literary Ca- tion often implied starvation, not glorious that Dickens had changed illustrators, but reers,’ ‘Rise of the Professional Author’). In independence, and the 1710 Act benefitted no one could determine whether the change every chapter Griffin asks what claims have publishers more than authors. Griffin has was for the better or not, as evidenced in the been made and what evidence supports or performed a real service in reconstructing ambivalence of contemporary reviews. The contradicts those claims. In case after case one eighteenth-century authors’ untidy, often role played by the Marcus Stone illustrations must admire his judicious skepticism – as, for contradictory, and slowly evolving sense of in the sales of monthly parts remains to be example, concerning the flimsy foundations what it meant to be an author. considered. for the ‘public sphere’ and the inflated claims Chapter 4, ‘A Dismal Swamp? Our Mutual for the importance of the Scriblerus Club. Robert D. Hume Friend and Victorian Critics,’ begins with John As Griffin demonstrates, patronage Penn State University, University Park Forster’s equivocal review in the Examiner for of various sorts persisted throughout the 28 October 1865, in which Forster acknowl- eighteenth century alongside the growing edged the book’s unity of design, “fancy” commercial market. Reading our concept of (Dickens’s term for imaginative power), ‘career’ back onto eighteenth-century authors telling descriptions, and well-wrought char- is a bad idea: they simply did not conceive of acters, but nonetheless concluded that Our what they were doing in our terms. Some writ- Mutual Friend “will never rank with his higher ers arguably come closer than others (Pope), efforts…[because] it wants freshness and but the chapter on ‘Authors by Profession’
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Keith Hanley and Brian Maidment, eds. Per- and influence as a critic. Ruskin’s advocacy of culture, notably drama; their broad variety sistent Ruskin: Studies in Influence, Assimilation of J. M. W. Turner seemed to Ruskin, in the of content and function, reaching far beyond and Effect. Burlington, VT, and Farnham, UK: early 1850s, to have failed; modern England news and information; and in particular, their Ashgate Publishing, 2013. xiv, 196p., ill. ISBN: had allowed the great painter to die neglected, commercial role. Heyd’s combination of old 9781409400769. £60 (hardback). despite Ruskin’s best efforts, and would also and new techniques – comparative history, ignore the message of Truth and Beauty to geographical specificity, and the study of Persistent Ruskin: Studies in Influence, Assimila- which the Stones of Venice spoke. Were the historical readers – enables a double-barrelled tion and Effect is a collection of twelve essays Pre-Raphaelites to be the successors to these? assault on unchallenged twenty-first-century edited and introduced by Keith Hanley and Ruskin declared that they were and, in helping assumptions, demonstrating conclusively that Brian Maidment, the aim of which is to pro- to secure their reputations, he vindicated his it did not have to be this way. vide an overview of the extent and diversity own critical voice. Similarly, Andrew Leng’s This is an empirical study, led by its im- of the influence of nineteenth-century Eng- “Enduring Ruskin? Bloomsbury’s Anxieties pressive variety of sources and methods, yet lish art critic and social theorist John Ruskin. of Influence” (105–116) considers the ne- informed by theory from history and media The anthology is part of Ashgate’s Nine- glected topic of Bloomsbury’s relationship to studies. Its great strengths are its comparisons teenth Century Series and springs from three Ruskin through a consideration of Virginia across time (the long eighteenth century) colloquia that considered Ruskin’s influence. Woolf’s Roger Fry: A Biography. Woolf, Leng and space: London, Edinburgh (the English It contains essays analysing Ruskin’s intended shows, played with the irony of Fry’s distaste provinces in passing), and the American audience and means of addressing them, his for Ruskin, suggesting that the irrational and eastern seaboard from the South to New Eng- influence among his contemporaries, and his contradictory propensities Fry declaimed in land. Sources include self-referential launch posthumous reception. The subject of the Ruskin, he himself exhibited. These were, manifestos and indexes; representations of collection is ambitious; the overall impression moreover, for Woolf, evidence of Fry’s legiti- newspapers on the stage; newspaper collec- is that it is less the “extended examination” macy as a critic, of his receptivity and sensitiv- tions in auction catalogues; and the indexing the editors claim and something closer to a se- ity to art. Both O’Gorman’s and Leng’s essays and annotations of one avid and memorably ries of snapshots of what was, without doubt, are clearly written accounts of ways in which named “quidnunc” or news addict, the Bos- a myriad of responses to Ruskin’s provoca- writers use the reputations of others to define ton shopkeeper Harbottle Dorr, from 1765 tive, original writings about art and society. or reinstate their own, and are thus contribu- to 1776. Heyd uses enough of each source – Certainly the authors would acknowledge that tions to the history of authorship. more than 100 introductory columns, content one volume could only begin to suggest the analysis of two newspapers’ indexes across scale and variety of Ruskin’s influence within Stephanie L. Derrick more than forty years, almost 100 plays, 132 nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture. University of Stirling, Scotland handwritten pages indexing 3,280 newspaper The essays are of varying quality, and pages, and about 50 auction catalogues – to some have a weak connection to the theme c inspire confidence in his conclusions. of Ruskin’s influence. Three, however, will be After a wide-ranging introduction, the of special interest to SHARP readers. Brian book is divided into two parts: first, how Maidment’s “Influence, Presence, Appro- Uriel Heyd. Reading Newspapers: Press and Public printers and publishers conceptualised the priation – Ruskinian Periodicals 1890–1910” in Eighteenth-Century Britain and America. Ox- newspaper, and second, how readers used the (67–78) describes Ruskin’s motivations for ford: Voltaire Foundation, 2012. xii, 302p., newspaper. Heyd convincingly synthesises his his frequent use of mid-Victorian periodi- ill. ISBN: 9780729410427. £65 / €78 / US evidence, for example by using manifestos cals, his principle ways of using the medium, $108 (paperback). and plays to establish the “freshness” of and the frustration with which his efforts to news, while showing how yearly and half- reach serious readers were ultimately met, This clear, confident and deeply thought- yearly indexes reveal a medium-term use of leading to his abandonment of the form in ful study of eighteenth-century newspaper newspapers, and finally showing how readers’ the 1870s. Maidment also considers three culture in Britain and America is the first newspaper collecting suggests newspapers’ late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century book-length history of newspaper reading, more long-term function as historical memo- ‘Ruskinian’ periodicals, The Ruskin Reading whose many insights should form a pro- ry-shapers (258–9). Heyd adds to established Guild Journal, Igdrasil, and St George, arguing gramme of study in this new field. Its greatest debates on objectivity, the newspaper and that in both physical form and objective these achievement is to dispel the ahistorical idea national and local identities, newspapers in represent a continuation of Ruskin’s influence that newspapers were ephemeral reading the republican/federalist debate, communal by means of the periodical. matter, suggesting instead that readers used versus individual newspaper consumption, Two other essays in the collection are them in three time-frames: short-, medium-, the economic role of the press, newspapers well-executed revisionist studies of now and long-term. This is only one of the ways as fact or forum (to use Nord’s terms), encod- canonical authors’ responses to other artists’ in which Heyd develops the familiar idea that ing and decoding (following Stuart Hall), and reputations. In “Did Ruskin Support the Pre- newspapers reshaped readers’ time and space: framing and news values. Raphaelites?” (81–91), Francis O’Gorman he also explores their ‘glocalising’ power (3), The book’s origins as a PhD dissertation convincingly argues that Ruskin’s public sharpening local identities whilst supporting occasionally obtrude, as in the overly detailed advocacy of the Pre-Raphaelite painters the diverging national identities of two na- analysis of the Dorr indexes and some very early in their career should be seen in light tions before and after American independ- short sub-sections, sometimes creating an of the need to recover his own credibility ence; their rapid spread into many aspects atomised, list-like structure rather than an https://scholarworks.umass.edu/sharp_news/vol23/iss3/1 8 et al.: Volume 23, Number 3 SHARP News Vol. 23, no. 3 Summer 2014 d
unfolding argument. Heyd’s stimulating in- friendship to their limit” (68), in contradistinc- Malva Kemnitz. Ästhetik der leisen Töne: Die sights are always fruitful, but occasionally go tion to the overtly homoerotic literature of visuelle Vorstellungswelt westdeutscher Verlage in der beyond the evidence, as in his thoughts on the fin de siècle. Buchwerbung der 1950er Jahre. (Buchwissenschaftli- the newspaper’s commercial role in building Later essays explore the influence of stage che Beiträge, vol. 86). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz national identity (61) or on changing Ameri- adaptation, intertextuality and literary review- Verlag, 2013. xii, 244p., ill. (w/41 col. plates) can conceptions of Britain (41–42). But these ing on Ouida’s career. Both Hayley Jayne ISBN 9783447100533. €52 (paperback). are mere quibbles when weighed against the Bradley and Sondeep Kandola use the theme book’s achievements, which demonstrate the of “changing the plot” to ask questions about In her monograph Ästhetik der leisen Töne enormous value of including reader evidence Ouida’s place in the literary market. Bradley (English translation Quiet aesthetics: The imagery in the history of newspapers. challenges the cliché of the hack dramatist of West German publishing houses in 1950s book who plunders popular novels for quick adapta- advertising), Malva Kemnitz discusses 1950s Andrew Hobbs tion, considering the effects of plot changes German marketing and advertising for fiction University of Central Lancashire in both authorised and unauthorised stage on the basis of publishers’ catalogues from adaptations of Moths; meanwhile Kandola’s the German Literary Archive in Marbach. c essay on Ouida’s and Vernon Lee’s aesthetic Her research questions deal with the im- fiction explores Ouida’s rewriting of the Pyg- agery of the catalogue covers: What sorts of malion and Galatea myth as she “inventively readers were depicted on the covers? Which Jane Jordan and Andrew King, eds. Ouida and models high art’s governing myth to figure symbols and visual strategies were employed? Victorian Popular Culture. Burlington, VT and a woman artist as the principle agent of its What can we learn about reading and society Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013. xiv, 234p., ill. ethical renovation” (99). Writing on Ouida from these publishers’ catalogue covers? ISBN 9781409405894. £60 (hardback). and Corelli, Nickianne Moody discusses both Kemnitz introduces readers to the 1950s authors’ invidious assumption of genius, but as an era, but does not explain conclusively This collection of nine essays opens up concludes that their appeal derives from the why she chose the decade between 1950 and new ground to scholars working both on reader’s “license to pursue what is personally 1960 for her study. She also mentions previ- Ouida and in related fields, including popular meaningful or culturally relevant…Readers ous studies, situating the monograph within fiction, print history, gender, comparative could appropriate, dismiss, expand and make the history of advertising first and foremost, literature, and the European reception of connections beyond authorial intention” and following with observations on the state British novelists. While Andrew King’s in- (128). of the field of book and publishing history troduction observes wryly that “[b]elittling A number of the essays discuss Ouida’s of 1950s West Germany (chapter 1). Ouida became a reflex in the early twentieth Italian writing in the context of both her In chapter 2, Kemnitz discusses her century” (3), this is more than simply a recov- literary aesthetic and her politics. In the final sources: 220 publishers’ catalogues from ery project on an unjustly sidelined Victorian section on “Ouida and Politics,” Diana Maltz nineteen publishing houses, as well as articles author. The selection and arrangement of es- mediates Ouida’s anti-pacifist stance through from the German book trade journal Börsen- says (under the headings “Rereading Ouida,” her ambivalent response to the Russian Tol- blatt. She painstakingly counts the number “Rewriting Ouida,” and “Ouida and Politics”) stoy, insightfully linking her “compassion for of articles and monographs used, charting create a tissue of connecting themes, con- anarchists” (in opposition to the mainstream her “source corpus” (23), though the chart stituting a challenge to the reader to look British press) to her “instinct for the the- is not particularly illuminating. Chapter 3 again at Ouida’s prodigious but apparently atrical” and her “customary defense of the discusses the contexts (history of advertising) “ephemeral” output. downtrodden” (145). Addressing the mod- and the approach, which she describes as a As King notes in his survey of her ca- ern reader, Lyn Pykett’s coverage of Ouida’s “cocktail of methods” (25) that combines reer, “Ouida’s fictional world of the 1880s journalism reveals her sustained interest in a content analysis, visual history, semiotics, is one where…tactically deployed wit has number of familiar topics, from environmen- and aesthetics of reception. Gérard Genette’s no long-term strategy in an endless battle of talism and the impact of new technologies paratexts could have been a good additional words…the very bleakness and rigour of her on the pace of modern life, to degeneration, “ingredient” here, since the terminology is vision constitutes a challenge to the reader” vivisection, and women’s rights. Little wonder particularly suited to book advertising. (26). In her complementary essay on “Ouida that Richard Ambrosini, writing on Ouida’s In chapter 4, Kemnitz gives information and the Canon,” Pamela K. Gilbert notes that political aesthetic, terms her “an extraordinary on the historical context, first on the book we need to get beyond “the strong-woman- reader of cultural signs” (176). market in the 1950s (production statistics, character litmus test” that has haunted non- This consideration of Ouida and Victorian reading habits, bestsellers, and so on). Kem- canonical texts in recent decades, and instead popular culture is meticulously researched and nitz explains that the literary market in the “find a mode of reading that fully respect[s] organised, and in its invitation to new modes 1950s was still very bourgeois in its tastes; the complexities” of women writers outside of reading, brings renewed vitality to discus- gatekeepers such as journalists frowned the Great Tradition (39) – a rallying call that is sions of Ouida’s achievement and that of her upon the “democratization” of reading and taken up by other contributors. Jane Jordan’s “popular” contemporaries. on popular fiction more generally. She also exploration of male friendship in Ouida’s considers general product advertising in the fiction, for instance, offers a nuanced and Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton 1950s, which was very dynamic, colourful, provocative account of how she “pushes the Canterbury Christ Church University and happy-go-lucky. culturally legitimate boundaries of romantic Kemnitz then (chapter 5) discusses pub- ... / 10
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... / 9 lishers’ catalogues in regard to other book continuity. A number of recent studies have bracing and unusual. It is also oddly chilling. advertising outlets such as posters and shop attempted a similar manoeuvre. Kuskin’s Kuskin aligns recursion with emancipation window advertising. For publishers’ cata- book is distinctive on three fronts. Firstly, and self-discovery, the values of the literary logues, she focuses on the covers, which form it places an unusual emphasis on fifteenth- imagination (13). Yet at times it seems every the basis for her content analysis (the results century literary culture as an intermediary bit as totalising and homogenous as what it of which are presented in chapter 6). She also between Renaissance authors and the age of replaces. Kuskin’s account of the replication looks at typical spending for book advertis- Chaucer. Secondly, it strongly foregrounds of literary code produces an oddly Hegelian ing, which is important since books are not technology and mediation: the movement structure: a literary economy in which nothing high-profit products and book advertising is of texts through successive iterations and be- is ever lost, in which every detail is recruited thus always particularly risky. tween manuscript and print. Thirdly, it aims to into a larger process of production. I write In general, chapter 6 proves that content develop a new metaphorics of periodisation. as someone who has himself argued “against analysis is a useful tool for publishing re- The medieval-Renaissance period boundary periodisation.” Yet to read Recursive Origins is search. For example, Kemnitz classifies the has often been constituted through images to be reminded of the extent to which pre- values propagated by the cover artwork into of death, burial, and resurrection. Consider modern writing aims to place itself and its “modern,” “humorous,” “erotic,” and “bour- Erwin Panofsky: “The Middle Ages had left readers at the service of social reproduction; geois.” It is to her merit that she meticulously antiquity unburied and alternately galvanized it is to experience a strange nostalgia for the documents her analysis in this chapter and in and exorcised its corpse. The Renaissance values of novelty, discontinuity, and historical the appendix, making it easier for readers to stood weeping at its grave and tried to resur- progression. understand her classifications. She also gives rect its soul.” Kuskin substitutes for this vivi- Alex Davis a few concrete examples including colour ficatory register the motif of recursion: “the University of St Andrews images in the appendix. Overall, Kemnitz return of a governing theme or an embedded comes to the conclusion that publishers’ repetition of the entire object within itself, c catalogues in the 1950s usually perpetuated such as a picture of the whole picture within the bourgeois act of reading; publishers chose the same picture” (8). The term derives from low-key, conservative imagery. Catalogues for computer science. Recursion, for Kuskin, cuts Martyn Lyons. The Writing Culture of Ordinary paperback series proved to be an exception: across period divisions by housing the past People in Europe, c. 1860–1920. Cambridge: these were much more direct, funny, and within the present, and it subverts linearity Cambridge University Press, 2013. xii, 286p., emotional (chapters 6 and 7). and progression because it understands the ill. ISBN 9781107018891. £68 / US $103 This study will be of appeal to advertis- propagation of a literary form as occurring (hardback). ISBN 9781139786492. US $82 ing and book historians and is definitely through algorithmic returns to previous itera- (ebook). original in its approach. Some parts leave me tions of that form. wondering, however, whether the individual Successive chapters of the book deal “The nation demands that this should traditions of each and every publishing house with Caxton’s printing of Chaucer’s Boece (c. be done and we will do it faithfully, fulfilling regarding corporate design might play a larger 1478); Edmund Spenser’s self-presentation every duty, however trivial, for the salvation role than Kemnitz allows for in her classifica- as the “new poet” in The Shepheardes Calendar and grandeur of our motherland and of our tion and content analysis. Certainly, the artistic (1579), and the significance of the returns to forefathers.” So wrote the Italian soldier preferences of the editor/publisher/director a fifteenth-century literary past in that text; Gerolamo Alloisio (cited 137). Alloisio served of advertising must all factor into the equa- the insertion of an anachronistic reference as a corporal in a cycle battalion and was killed tion as well. to printing into the Folio version of the in action in July 1915. Even though he had play first published as The First Part of the encountered mass death, his loyalty remained Corinna Norrick-Rühl Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of intact and his patriotic resolve wavered only University of Münster, Germany Yorke and Lancaster (1594), better known as after a very long time. Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI; Caxton’s Recuyell of This is but one of many examples of ordi- c the Histories of Troye (1473–4) as an intertext nary writing presented in Lyons’ recent book for Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida; and on writing culture. The study often reads like the Pavier Quartos, a group of ten plays by a well-chosen collection of twelve separate William Kuskin. Recursive Origins: Writing at the Shakespeare published by Thomas Pavier and essays, due to the many different topics within Transition to Modernity. Notre Dame, Indiana: printed in 1619 – coherently focused, Kuskin the theme of ordinary writing that the author University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. xvi, argues, on questions of history and on the investigates. For practical reasons, the second 280p., ill. ISBN 9780268033255. US $35 fifteenth century in particular. chapter, on archives, stands out. As the letters (paperback). Recursive Origins is exceptionally strong in and journals of ordinary men and women its detail, and will be of value to anybody have rarely been studied structurally and have William Kuskin’s Recursive Origins is writ- interested in the reception of late medieval only recently gained attention from scholars, ten against periodisation. It hopes to rethink culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth this chapter functions as a springboard for the question of the English Renaissance’s centuries, or in the relationship between anyone interested in the history of writing. indebtedness to the medieval, setting itself manuscript and print technologies. More The chapter endorses the critical assessment against modernity understood as the spread generally, the technological and machinic of conventional institutional archives and of a language of novelty and historical dis- tenor of Kuskin’s thought is wonderfully inspires its readers to study “the new history https://scholarworks.umass.edu/sharp_news/vol23/iss3/1 10 et al.: Volume 23, Number 3 SHARP News Vol. 23, no. 3 Summer 2014 d 11
from below” – a term used often throughout Robyn Malo. Relics and Writing in Late Medieval studies in fifteenth-century Middle English the book – as a rarely explored field with England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, writing (Capgrave, Lydgate, and Bradshaw significant potential. 2013. x, 302p., ill. ISBN: 9781442645639. primarily) in which the “commonplaces” she Chapters 5 through 9 show the most CAN $70 (hardback). has identified in relic discourse are developed, coherence: in them the author showcases focusing especially on the attention paid samples of ordinary writing from French and Robyn Malo’s book is a clear, synthetic to the opulence and power of the shrines Italian soldiers fighting in the First World War account of the importance of medieval themselves, rather than relics. and their family members back at home. Their writing about relics to the broader medieval Each chapter of Part 2 then analyzes a writing served different purposes: to show cultural practice of relic worship, which she specific problem or tension in relic discourse loved ones they were still alive, to manage understands to be fundamentally dependent exploited by, or exemplified by, a literary family affairs, to record their experiences, and upon the narrative and theoretical accounts form. In chapter 3, Malo analyzes English so on. Other examples exist simply because produced by clerics, and later re-interpreted grail legends (the alliterative Joseph and The the soldiers and their families enjoyed writing. by literary artists and religious polemicists. History of the Holy Grail and Malory’s Morte When placed in context, such written records By focusing on this heterogeneous written d’Arthur) with a special focus on the way these reveal the writers’ ability to uncover contem- material (history, hagiography, romance, legends pose the question of whether any- porary thought at grassroots level. vernacular literature, and polemical writing), body can achieve by merit the right to view Through careful scrutiny, differences in collectively described throughout the book as a relic, the negative answer to which justifies national consciousnesses appear, thereby “relic discourse,” Malo aims to shift attention the increasingly restrictive access. Chapter contributing to our knowledge of national away from the theology of relics and toward 4 reads Chaucer’s Pardoner and his Tale, as identity formation. Lyons furthermore the written accounts that mediated all contact well as Troilus and Criseyde, for evidence that distinguishes a dynamic interplay between with relics; this discourse includes skepticism Chaucer is engaging with the problems of, oral and written culture, and redefines the and doubt about the specific practices of relic respectively, relic custodians (as figured by the concept of literacy in relation to the work of custodians and their institutions, which placed Pardoner and Pandarus) and the misplaced these ordinary writers. As mentioned above, greater emphasis on the opulence of shrines devotion of the cult of saints (as figured by not everything in the study shows as much from the twelfth century onward. Troilus’ devotion to Criseyde, but also the coherence as the chapters on French and Her argument is staged as a middle ground three rioters’ pursuit of the “treasure” of Italian ordinary writing. The author is well between a straightforward skepticism of relics gold in the Pardoner’s Tale). Chapter 5 argues aware of this and presses the need for further and an overly-credulous investment in their that Wycliffites were less invested in the international, comparative investigation. Even power. SHARP News readers will be particu- rejection of the veneration of saints than though the corpus of material investigated is larly interested in the “writing” part of her they were in the rejection of the “sumptuous from areas where the spread of writing did title, which carries the freight of her argument barbarism” they saw in the proliferating opu- not take place identically, the commonality that what matters in the study of the cultural lence of saints’ shrines. Indeed, she argues of certain important features are highlighted, impact of relics is the writing, not the relic that both Wycliffite polemical writing and resulting in an exciting insight into sometimes itself. As she puts in her introduction: “We literary texts such as The Lanterne of Light and subversive thoughts and ideas. Ordinary writ- need to think more reflexively about how writ- Pierce the Plowman’s Creed invert the standard ers were trying to find a new identity, a new ing has mediated our experience of medieval argument that opulent shrines justly celebrate place in the rapidly changing world around relic cults because it is the primary evidence the beauty of the saint in order to focus on them, which often resulted in social critique. that remains of them” (17). This focus on “the human body as more valuable than any In many instances, Lyons shows such writers writing produces an important interpretive material treasure” (175). resisting both anonymity and modernity. shift toward the texts themselves, utilizing Engaging and thoughtful references to “This study has sketched the contours of the tools and techniques of literary criticism, contemporary culture in both the introduc- a submerged continent of ordinary writings” rather than a focus on the cultural practices tion and the coda reveal a playful and creative (245), Lyons notes at the start of the conclud- and theological arguments of the cult of saints thinker with a lively sense of the reader, and ing chapter. And indeed it has. Throughout in conventional studies. give the book a nice shape as we enter and the book, Lyons successfully challenges two After an introduction that surveys exist- exit the often exotic world of medieval relic persistent notions: first, that few people were ing scholarship and summarizes the content cults with a sense of their continued rel- able to write about complex matters; and of the book, Malo’s book divides into two evance to our own understanding of the same second, that there is little evidence of ordi- parts: “Relic Discourse and the Cult of Saints” problems. There are occasional moments in nary writing to be found. This immediately (chapters 1 and 2) and “The Trouble With the book where the reader may find, as I did, opens up a remarkable field of enquiry – a Relic Discourse” (chapters 3–5). Chapter 1 fo- that Malo forces an analogy drawn from relic history from below – which is well worth cuses on the changes in English architectural discourse onto a text rather than developing investigating. practices from the twelfth to the fourteenth her ideas from the text, and several of these Arnold Lubbers centuries that produced elaborate monuments, moments occur in the chapter on Chaucer. University of Amsterdam known as feretory shrines, which increasingly For instance, in her discussion of Chaucer’s restricted pilgrims’ access to shrines; in Malo’s Troilus and Criseyde Malo “occludes” one half argument, “[w]riting filled the gap created of Antigone’s comparison of the experience by the occlusion of these major relics” (31). of love to saints in Heaven and fiends in In chapter 2, Malo develops a series of case Hell in her reply to Criseyde’s query about ... / 12
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... / 11 her song. By focusing on the saints and ig- fact, they helped engender the “age of literary advertising altered the content of the poetry. noring the fiends, she musters the quote in branding” (80). Contradicting the notion that Nonetheless, Mason persuasively shows how support of her argument that relic discourse Byron woke one morning and found himself thoroughly connected art and commerce “pervades” the poem, where a careful reader famous, Mason shows how Byron and his became in the period despite Romantic pos- might not see this quote as responding to relic publishers created Brand Byron. This brand- turing about artistic independence. discourse at all. But these are small quibbles ing meant that while Britons may not have about a book that provides a useful and con- known what Childe Harold was about when Daniela Garofalo densed articulation of the need for thinking it first appeared, they knew very well who University of Oklahoma, Norman about the ways in which writing about relics Byron was supposed to be. Publicity about extended, critiqued, and redeployed the cen- the author himself, rather than the work, tral terms of relic discourse. In support of sold his poems. c her proposition that “the meaning of relics L.E.L. and William Jerdan, the editor of came to depend more and more on being the Literary Gazette, also demonstrated real interpreted through writing” (188), the book advertising skill and innovation in market- Anne-Marie Millim. The Victorian Diary: Au- paves the way for more modern interpretive ing. First, they promoted L.E.L. by using the thorship and Emotional Labour. Burlington, VT work on the circulation of relics in broader “bandwagon effect.” Disproving the long and Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013. x, 222p. literary discourse. held notion that L.E.L. had created a furor ISBN 9781409435761. £60 (hardback). Ashby Kinch due to her anonymity, Mason shows how the University of Montana, Missoula poet’s fame was mostly manufactured: “the In the practice of literary self-reflection, popularity of both L.E.L. and her breakout diaries have often been opposed to autobi- c book were widely reported fictions before ographies. Set against the single interpreta- they became reality. Accordingly, they repre- tion of the full-length memoir, they are the sent remarkably early instances of successful day-to-day records of a life, by their nature Nicholas Mason. Literary Advertising and the bandwagon marketing and the manufactured fragmentary and by their practice often mun- Shaping of British Romanticism. Baltimore, MD: media event” (98). Second, Mason examines dane. Their only necessary conclusion is the John Hopkins University Press, 2013. x, 206p., the use of L.E.L.’s image to sell her work, death of the author or the abandonment of ill. ISBN 9781421409986. £32 / US $49.95 offering an early example of sophisticated the discipline of the regular entry. Millim’s (hardback). image management (102). L.E.L. morphed carefully considered study begins by insisting “from the mysterious poetess perpetually on qualities in common. The genres share a For some time, scholars, guided by Thomas hidden behind her initials into a bona fide preoccupation with the inner self as the re- Richards’s The Commodity Culture of Victorian icon whose likeness was scattered far and sponsible agent of a life, and an overarching England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914, wide throughout the empire”; she successfully narrative structure that governs the selection thought that a modern advertising culture catered “to an increasingly visual society” and weighting of material. only really took off after 1850. However, (102). Diaries are, however, even more varied recent work by John Strachan and others has From its two case studies of remarkably than autobiographies in their form and in shown that eighteenth-century manufacturers successful poets, the book moves to a more the range of preoccupations that they reflect. were already producing sophisticated adver- general consideration of the effects of liter- After a substantial introduction, The Victo- tisements a century earlier and that even the ary puffery. Mason contends that “the puff rian Diary narrows its focus to a handful of idea of branding had been pioneered earlier became British Romanticism’s dirty little works, some familiar to literary and cultural by men like Wedgewood. In light of this new secret” (120). The practice of writing one’s historians, others less so. Successive chapters work, Nicholas Mason’s Literary Advertising own reviews or of getting a friend to do the examine the diaries of Elizabeth Eastlake and and the Shaping of British Romanticism offers a work was widespread; “the names of the Henry Crabb Robinson, George Eliot and timely study of a particularly under-examined more revered Romantics” could be added to George Gissing, John Ruskin, and Gerald area of advertising. Building on the work a list of writers who followed this practice. Manley Hopkins and Edith Simcox. In mak- of Strachan, Mason reveals the inescapable Mason mentions Mary Wollstonecraft, Walter ing this selection, Millim has met head-on one imbrication of literature and advertising. If Scott, the Lake poets, and the writers of the of the most familiar criticisms of the genre: Romanticists have long tended to assume that Cockney school. In fact, Mason contends, one that too often the entries avoid any serious literary art kept itself above the messiness of of the provocations for the infamous attack engagement with the inner lives of the writers. marketing, Mason insists instead, that “such on Keats in Blackwood “was the shameless Her claim is that her “barebones” texts are basic components of modern literature as manner in which they saw him being puffed linked by a common desire to suborn emotion periodical criticism and the author function in the Examiner and elsewhere” (131). to professional success. All her writers are were born out of the advertising logic that Exploding time-revered myths about preoccupied with the prospect of a literary permeated Britain” (5). some of the most important writers of the career and the function of their diaries is to The book examines the astute marketing age, Mason’s Literary Advertising provides a manage their private lives in order to promote of authors such as Byron and L.E.L. Byron valuable contribution to our understanding public attainment, or, as for instance in the and his publishers “offered an advanced un- of how the Romantic literary system actu- case of Henry Crabb Robinson, to locate derstanding of the new advertising system in ally worked. Literary scholars may wish the in their emotional inadequacy the failure to general and branding in particular” (75). In book offered more thorough analyses of how achieve fulfilment as an author. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/sharp_news/vol23/iss3/1 12 et al.: Volume 23, Number 3 SHARP News Vol. 23, no. 3 Summer 2014 d 13
This approach works particularly well with enough to overwhelm scholars and readers. Bland (the pseudonym of Edith Nesbit and Eliot, Gissing, and Ruskin. Eliot and Giss- Deborah Mutch’s five-volume set of socialist Hubert Bland when writing together), which ing can be shown to be keeping emotional periodical literature is to be commended for was originally published in the socialist jour- ledgers, calculating profit and loss in terms gathering these texts into a more accessible nal To-Day but has no obvious link to socialist of their output and its public reception. The form. She aims to “give an overview of the politics. A Gothic work of science fiction inner life is not the objective but a resource, fiction published in the longer-running and set in New England and indebted to Poe, to be reviewed, managed, lamented and, to influential periodicals of the British social- “Blood” tells the story of a doctor, a blood judge from the entries cited, just occasion- ist movement” (1: ix). This representation transfusion, and a therianthropic wife. ally celebrated. The sheer regularity of the can convey, she says, only “a flavour of the Scholars of New Woman fiction will diary form is counterbalanced by the daily phenomenal socialist literary output” (1: ix), find lots of rich socialist-feminist material. task of filling the unforgiving blank page of but it is a flavor that is difficult to sample Margaret McMillan’s “Mary’s Lover” (Clarion, the literary endeavour. Ruskin’s enterprise elsewhere. 1896) offers moving insight into the hopes as a critic was dependent on his capacity to Most of this fiction has never been bound and desires of an aged working-class woman, professionalise emotion, to place his deepest in the pages of a book, and Mutch makes treated here with a depth and sensitivity rarely experiences at the service of his response to a point to select work by non-canonical granted to older working women in Victorian art and architecture. The diary served as a authors (though writers like William Mor- fiction. Also of note is the serialized novel means of shepherding his time and his emo- ris and George Bernard Shaw did publish Connie by John Law (Margaret Harkness), a tions to this end, and seeking to preserve his in the socialist press). The set is organized fascinating free love novel, unfortunately left mental stability in the process. It was a labour chronologically, with each volume covering unfinished when theLabour Elector folded be- with no guaranteed outcome. Millim cites the a span of years, and the literature is further fore serialization was complete (1893–94). entry for 3 September 1879: “every year leaves organized within each volume by periodical. Among the serialized novels in the collec- me more lost to myself and my memories – a The headnotes for each periodical offer use- tion, Charles Allen Clarke’s The Cotton Panic gleaner in reaped or ravaged fields” (141). ful information, such as dates, editorial staff, (Teddy Ashton’s Northern Weekly, 1900–01) The frame of the book is a little stretched and affiliations. is particularly ripe for rediscovery. This his- by the final two subjects. Gerald Manley Hop- Much of the literature is intrinsically inter- torical novel, depicting Lancashire during kins’ reviews of his emotions are designed to esting, but readers who are not already versed the Cotton Famine that accompanied the be productive not of secular achievement but in turn-of-the-century socialism may wish for American Civil War, sets its broader critique of moments of static vision and religious ful- more editorial guidance. The apparatus is thin of international capitalism against a sinister filment. The less well-known Edith Simcox is – perhaps understandably so given the size of story of polygamous Mormon seduction. seeking to evaluate and substantiate her emo- the collection – and there is context for the A sub-plot on the Utah frontier is strongly tions in the face of her unrequited passion for fiction, but little interpretation. Compounding reminiscent of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The George Eliot. Nonetheless The Victorian Diary this difficulty is the editor’s decision to ignore Dynamiter (1885) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s A is a substantial achievement, fully justifying questions of aesthetic value altogether. The Study in Scarlet (1887) – an excellent example its concluding aspiration that it will “further concluding sentence of the general introduc- of how socialist authors used contemporary energise the field” and thus extend it to other tion states that “the fiction of the socialist sensational genres toward political ends. “nonartists and workers” (185). periodicals should not be judged by canonical In sum, future scholars of socialist litera- criteria of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ art but recognized ture will find much to be thankful for in this David Vincent for the multidimensional document it was collection, which makes a wealth of material The Open University, UK then and remains so now” (1: xxiv). This is a more easily accessible. reasonable stance, given the class values that c often adhere in such judgments, but it makes Elizabeth Carolyn Miller the collection less accessible than it might have University of California, Davis been for classroom use or non-specialist read- Deborah Mutch, ed. British Socialist Fiction, ers. Editors of socialist periodicals, though c 1884–1914. 5 vols. London: Pickering & committed to including literature, often strug- Chatto, 2013. 2080p. (vol. 1: lvi, 344p.; vol. 2: gled to fill pages; it was not always easy to find xiv, 402p.; vol. 3: xiv, 466p.; vol. 4: xiv, 370p.; talented fiction writers willing to contribute Mary-Céline Newbould. Adaptations of Lau- vol. 5: xiv, 386p.). ISBN: 9781848933576. work without, in most cases, being paid. rence Sterne’s Fiction: Sterneana, 1760–1840. £450 / US $795 (hardback). The collection does feature some literary Burlington, VT and Farnham, UK: Ashgate, gems. Highlights among the short stories in- 2013. xvi, 280p., ill. ISBN 9781409455837. The sheer immensity of the periodical clude Edward Carpenter’s “Saved by a Nose” £60 (hardback). archive poses theoretical and procedural (Clarion, 1892), a comic story that makes a difficulties for all scholars of modern print serious point about state surveillance of com- Few books have spawned as many imita- culture. Even when focusing narrowly on munists, and Isabella O. Ford’s “In the Good tions as Tristram Shandy, and few novels have a more-or-less wieldy section of periodical Old Times” (Labour Leader, 1911), which uses had the impact that A Sentimental Journey has literature – in this case, fiction published in tropes of the ghost story to convey the haunt- had on European culture. The literary as British socialist periodicals between 1884 and ing specter of child labor. One of the most well as ephemeral offspring of both works 1914 – the volume of material is more than amusing stories is “Blood” (1886) by Fabian was first charted by J. C. T. Oates, whose ... / 14
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... / 13 vast collection of early Sterneana is now in tween 1760 and 1840 conclude this essential Nonetheless, individual essays make for the University Library of Cambridge. More study of an important phenomenon. good reading. Beer and Levine are always recently, René Bosch’s Labyrinth of Digressions worth attending to. Beer’s remarks about (2007) and the catalogues of visual repre- Peter de Voogd Darwinian extravagance and Levine’s about sentations of Sterne and his works by W. B. University of Utrecht, NL Darwinian paradox remind us why they are Gerard and Brigitte Friant-Kessler that have two of Darwin’s best and most careful read- appeared over the years in The Shandean have c ers. Stott’s essay on evolution in Tennyson’s listed the amazing variety of responses to The Princess in relation to the young poet’s Sterne’s fictions. Mary-Céline Newbould puts struggle to move from an all-male social world many of the known facts into a new and fuller Valerie Purton, ed. Darwin, Tennyson and Their at Cambridge to the world of mixed-sex con- perspective. Readers: Explorations in Victorian Literature and versation in London intellectual society is a In a thoughtful opening chapter she Science. London, New York and Delhi: Anthem strong one. Dawson’s account of the cultural theoretically “frames” the many different Press, 2013. xxii, 170p. ISBN 9780857280763. life of Darwin’s Beagle fossils is fascinating, Sternean adaptations, imitations, paratexts, £60 / US $99. and Matthew Rowlinson offers something and images, arguing that the very extensive- fresh in his analysis of Tennyson’s use of ness of the material makes inclusiveness Amidst the plethora of celebrations of ‘type’ in In Memoriam. neither practicable nor desirable. Rather, she Charles Darwin in 2009 was a conference For members of SHARP, however, the opts for selection of an item for its ability to at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge reference to readers in the book’s title will highlight four main areas of Sterneana: travel on Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers. Ten- raise expectations left largely unfulfilled. Only writing; sentimental writing, including poetry nyson, one of the other great exemplars of a few of the essays – those of Stott and Daw- and miscellanies such as The Beauties of Sterne; the Victorian age, was born, like Darwin, in son most prominently – really engage with the dramatic adaptations, including music; and 1809, and was affected nearly as much as Dar- world of Victorian reading and book culture, visual material. With a very few exceptions win was – albeit in different ways – by such and with recent scholarship on that subject. – some forays into France and one or two works of science as Charles Lyell’s Principles Neither the conference nor the collection American examples – most of her samples of Geology (1830–33) and Robert Chambers’ presents itself as specifically addressing those are British. Although one can understand anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of issues, it must be said, so that should not be her reluctance to move outside Britain, it Creation (1844). regarded as a fault, nor as a case of deceptive might have been better to take into account The present volume is a collection of pa- advertising. Those interested in Darwin and Continental Sterneana, if only by picking pers presented at that conference. It includes Tennyson, rather than their readers, will find out some very exemplary items. After all, contributions by Gillian Beer and George Le- more from which to profit here. Sterne’s influence has always been greater on vine, whose Darwin’s Plots (1983) and Darwin the Continent than in his own country, where and the Novelists (1988), respectively, opened up Jonathan Smith Samuel Johnson, Thackeray, and F. R. Leavis the study of Darwin and Victorian literature, University of Michigan-Dearborn have seen to it that, until quite recently, Sterne as well as the work of scholars such as Gowan was seen as a minor and rather quaint figure Dawson, Rebecca Stott, Roger Ebbatson, and not really worth bothering with. Jeff Wallace, who have brought new perspec- c The chapter on adaptations of A Senti- tives both to the study of Darwin and to the mental Journey covers the many travel narra- investigation of Victorian literature and sci- Miranda Remnek, ed. The Space of the Book: tives (including some French ones) in which ence more broadly. Print Culture in the Russian Social Imagination. Sterne’s focus on feeling rather than chronol- Unfortunately, the collection is beset by Toronto, Buffalo, NY and London: University ogy or Baedeker-like description is followed, the weaknesses that often afflict such vol- of Toronto Press, 2011. xii, 316p., ill. ISBN and includes, perhaps surprisingly, some umes. The quality of the essays is uneven, 9781442641020. CAN $60 (hardback). unsentimental journeys (which criticize the and some are rather brief or underdeveloped. sentimentalism of many of these adaptations) Levine’s contribution, originally one of the This collection of ten essays (derived from and, less surprisingly, eroticized journeys of plenary addresses for the conference, is more seminars at the University of Illinois in 2006) the heart. This is followed by a useful over- than twice the length of the shortest essays, explores aspects of publishing and readership view of the many extracts and “Beauties” of and substantially longer than most of the in Russia from the late eighteenth century to Sterne. Chapter four opens up the relatively others. The volume as a whole better reflects the present. The editor, Miranda Remnek, unexplored field of stage adaptations: this the miscellaneous and peripatetic “explora- tries to bring coherence both through her offers several highly surprising finds, and it tions” of the subtitle than the tighter thematic general introduction and through prefatory is a good thing that Newbould has mined the coherence the main title might suggest. The notes to each of the chapters. lesser-known vaudeville programmes of the four-year gap between event and publication The three essays in the opening cluster deal early nineteenth century. The last chapter fo- also resulted in several of the contributions with the earlier period. Lina Bernstein surveys cuses on the numerous visual interpretations having already appeared elsewhere in fuller books about trade and books for merchants of Sterne’s works. form; this is true of Levine’s piece, which in the second half of the eighteenth century. An extensive thirty-page bibliography and reflects arguments made in his Darwin the George Gutsche introduces some of the a very useful representative chronology of Writer (2011), and of those by Ebbatson and tensions in literary society of the early 1830s nearly three hundred Sterneana created be- Dawson. through a snapshot of the reception held by https://scholarworks.umass.edu/sharp_news/vol23/iss3/1 14 et al.: Volume 23, Number 3 SHARP News Vol. 23, no. 3 Summer 2014 d 15
the publisher Aleksandr Smirdin to mark the criterion, and the editor’s attempts to package books to develop as narrative. opening of his new shop in February 1832. the book are somewhat strained, as if con- Readers will immediately notice reso- Joseph Peschio and Igor Pil’shchikov analyse textualising it as part of an unrealised project nances with The Making of Middlebrow Culture esoteric poetic allusions through which mem- extraneous to the tasks which the contributors in particular, from the framing of the twen- bers of elite groups of the 1820s and 1830s actually set themselves. tieth-century intellectual bourgeoisie as the signalled to each other as privileged readers. Remnek’s own “allographic peritext” descendant of the genteel literary tradition, The largest group of essays focuses on includes, for each essay, tenuously linked re- to the recurrence of figures such as Clifton “popular” readerships of the late nineteenth marks on digital tools. She also announces (18) Fadiman and Henry Seidel Canby. The col- and early twentieth centuries, beginning with the construction of a website of resources on lection’s most substantive departure from thematically linked pieces on the very dra- Russian print culture and digital methodolo- this previous work, its yoking of musicians matic proliferation and expansion of school gies, but the proposed link via the University and composers with literary mediators, is libraries (Ben Eklof) and factory libraries for of Illinois library site does not appear to be unfortunately also its main conceptual weak- workers’ education (Leonid Borodkin and active. ness. Cultural Considerations is divided into Evgeny Chugunov). In one of the most origi- Remnek is right that “a fully-fledged two sections, the first, “Readers & Critics,” nal and evocative contributions, Kevin M. English-language history of print culture in dealing with postwar popular culture and the Kain explores the impact of contemporary Russia remains to be written” (7), but her place of literature, and the next, “Compos- print culture on what is commonly assumed own introductory overview includes surpris- ers, Conductors & Their Audiences,” dealing to have been a notably self-contained and ing assessments, such as the statement that with the place of music. The introduction traditionalist area of manuscript culture. He the origins of Muscovite printing in the contextualizes these chapters within Rubin’s shows how the “Old Believers,” in narrative early 1550s “did not lag behind its European previous work – going so far as to summarize and pictorial representations of the seven- counterparts for many years” (4). Russians the premises of Middlebrow Culture and Songs teenth-century Patriarch Nikon (whom they actively engaged with some of the products of Ourselves within the first few paragraphs held responsible for the abominations of the of West European print culture at least from – but never establishes the distinction of official Church), responded to contemporary the 1490s, but a continuous tradition of native their arguments or the difference that the scholarly and fictional accounts. Jeffrey P. printing did not really get underway until the inclusion of a musical thread makes. How Brooks, patriarch (in a different sense) of early seventeenth century. can the career of Robert Shaw, a popular modern studies of late-nineteenth-century Simon Franklin choral conductor of everything from “Negro popular cultures of reading in Russia, argues Clare College, Cambridge spirituals” to Brahms, speak to the careers that moral complexity was not the preroga- of academic popularizers of literary clas- tive of elite culture, but can be found in the c sics, such as Gilbert Highet? The collection popular lubok prints produced by “semi-edu- never asks such potentially compelling – and cated” artists. certainly pressing – questions, and as a result Moving to the post-Revolutionary era, Joan Shelley Rubin. Cultural Considerations: Es- the two sections of the text remain largely Stephen Lovell makes a characteristically says on Readers, Writers, and Musicians in Postwar divorced, with a greater analytic emphasis on thoughtful attempt to deal with the impos- America. Amherst and Boston: University literature, the main focus of the collection’s sible task of surveying general issues of both of Massachusetts Press, 2013. 208p. ISBN framing essays. Soviet and post-Soviet readership. At the 9781625340146. US $22.95. The essays offer the most food for thought other end of the scale of specificity, Anne when considered in the Montagnian sense, as O. Fisher considers the semantic implica- Joan Shelley Rubin’s most recent books, attempts and explorations that aim not at a tions, for readers, of critics’ forewords (or, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992) clear throughline but at scholarly suggestive- in her terminology, allographic peritexts) to and Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in ness. The historical glimpses that Rubin of- the satirical works of Il’f and Petrov. Finally, America (2007) established her expertise in fers provide fodder for further development, Marianna Tax Choldin offers brief reflec- twentieth-century intellectual history and the and the documentation of under-studied tions on the legacy of censorship in current often-overlooked role of cultural mediation. popular figures such as the novelist James Russian media. In work that ranges broadly across topics Gould Cozzens and the musician Gunther This is a useful miscellany: a mixture of the from the establishment of the Book of the Schuller justify their own existence, even mainstream (the literary elites of the 1830s; Month Club in the 1920s to the recitation of lacking a larger historical narrative. Cultural the growth of popular readership from the poetry in American schools, Rubin argues canon formation, Rubin argues throughout, late nineteenth century) and the overlooked compellingly for the historical value of the is driven to a large extent by “American (merchants as readers in the eighteenth middlebrow American cultural consumer. academics’ penchant for enshrining alienated century; the Old Believer engagement with The essays in Cultural Considerations explore intellectuals”(60). Rubin’s work, in recovering contemporary print). The essays are accessible the topics of mediators and general readers artists, academics, and critics who had been to non-Russianists and students: only one in the years immediately following the Second left to the dustbins of history, restores a includes substantial quotations in Russian, all World War, but extend their range into musical cultural past that is rich and evocative, if at of which are also given in English. We would composition as well as literature. The essays times overwhelming in its scope. The essays not expect comprehensive or entirely neat clearly unfold with an eye toward what Rubin in Cultural Considerations are reminders of the coverage in a volume such as this. Purpose- calls “the revealing, neglected episode”(7), but value of a more inclusive intellectual history, ful collective coherence is not the paramount they lack the cohesion that allowed her earlier but also of the possible pitfalls of a cultural ... / 16
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... / 15 arena that is by its very definition expansive She contends that Williams adapts “politi- stein; it may have been fruitful also to examine and not easily curtailed. cal commentary” as a mode for “describing Shelley’s interrogation of science and creation and prophesying the significance of events as a Romantic visionary. Smith’s treatments Christa Holm Vogelius unfolding around her” (99). Williams, Smith of Mathilda, Valperga, and The Last Man are The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa suggests, first performs the role of a “passive far more rewarding, as she persuasively shows spectator” and then the role of a prophet how Shelley creates prophets and spiritual c (101). She also summarizes Williams’ con- authorities who actively participate in the tributions as a poet, but does not connect societies they inhabit. Orianne Smith. Romantic Women Writers, her poems to possible attempts at prophecy. Smith thus provides a new perspective Revolution, and Prophecy: Rebellious Daughters, Smith’s re-evaluation of Williams’ 1790 novel on the study of Romantic eschatology. The 1786–1826. Cambridge: Cambridge Universi- Julia is far more satisfying, arguing that her book is beneficial for scholars interested ei- ty Press, 2013. x, 292p. ISBN 9781107027060. eponymous heroine is unable to prophesy ther in how women writers internalized and £55 / US $95 (hardback). “beyond the realm of the personal” because responded to the Revolution and Napoleonic her social movement is “limited to the private zeitgeists or how prophecy functions in Ro- Orianne Smith unveils an ambitious piece sphere” (111). mantic literature. Smith’s inquiries raise ques- of scholarship in Romantic Women Writers, Smith then examines prophecy in Ann tions concerning the presence and function Revolution, and Prophecy. In the last forty years Radcliffe’s novels, arguing that Radcliffe of prophecy in certain texts and it is hoped of Romantic criticism, M. H. Abrams, J. A. responds to the “eschatological significance that her book will stimulate new interest on Pocock, Harold Bloom, Morton Paley, Steven of the French Revolution” and the “spiritual the subject of Romantic women prophets. Goldsmith, Ian Balfour, and Tim Fulford – to crisis in England” with the suffering of her name but a few – have contributed fruitful heroines who reflect “the Imitatio Christi Luke Iantorno analyses of prophecy and eschatological tradition” (131, 134). Her thought-provok- Texas Tech University, Lubbock themes in Romanticism. There has been a ing analysis, however, is less about prophecy recent lapse in Romantic eschatology studies, than it is a way to connect the Revolution to c yet Smith breathes new life into a topic that Radcliffe’s novels. Smith proposes that the deserves further attention. In her book, she heroines’ suffering and redemption reflect Roger E. Stoddard, comp. A Bibliographical examines the hopes and fears of women writ- the overthrow of the ancien régime and the Description of Books and Pamphlets of American ers who actively embedded themselves in the resurrection of virtue. The most captivating Verse Printed from 1610 through 1820. Edited tradition of prophecy at a “critical juncture moment of the chapter is in its final pages, by David R. Whitesell. University Park, PA: of sacred and secular history” (2). where Smith discusses Joanna Southcott’s Pennsylvania State University Press for the In chapter one, Smith frames her discus- reception and analysis of The Romance of the Bibliographical Society of America, 2012. sion of prophecy within a broader study of Forest. Here, she reveals an interesting theory xx, 809p., ill. ISBN 9780271052212. US enthusiasm, claiming that the French Revolu- about readership, yet it comes only as an $179.95. tion “brought a new sense of urgency to the afterthought and deserves more attention in discussion regarding the merits and perils of the future. Over fifty years ago, at the outset of his female enthusiasm” (55). Smith concludes this In chapter five, Smith argues that Anna distinguished career as a librarian and bibli- discussion with Germaine de Staël, and argues Laetitia Barbauld’s role as a prophet “deepens ographer, Roger Stoddard began compiling that her unsuccessful attempt to publish On our understanding of the connections be- addenda to Oscar Wegelin’s pioneering bibli- nd Germany in 1810 began the “fall of the female tween Romantic millennialism and Enlighten- ography, Early American Poetry (2 ed., 1930). prophetic tradition in the Romantic era” ment thinking” (158). She connects the idea After several interim reports and updates (67). Does textual evidence show prophetic that “human experience is future-oriented over the years, Stoddard’s magnum opus has discourse thriving beyond 1810? If so, where and always evolving into a progressively more now been published, a grand testimony to does Romantic women’s prophecy truly end perfect state” to Barbauld’s early poems (159). bibliographical scholarship and diligence. It and a new era of prophecy begin? Such ques- Barbauld’s later poems, however, contain “a is also, and will remain, an invaluable tool for tions are not fully addressed here. darker and more apocalyptic interpretation of understanding the production and dissemina- In chapter two, Smith examines Hester contemporary events” (176). Smith further tion of an important genre of early American Lynch Piozzi’s reinvention of herself as contends that Barbauld and other persecuted literature. As Stoddard reminds us, “Poetry an “improvvisatrice” who represents “a Dissenters, rather than creating poetic perso- is the first genre of American belles lettres, safe version of enthusiasm” (82, 83). Smith nae who imitate Christ, embody “a contem- and the predominant one, until the decades persuasively shows how Piozzi pacifies the porary type of Christ” (179–180). after 1820, when it is rivaled by fiction” (vi). tension between correct and incorrect forms Smith lastly examines Mary Shelley’s Hence this bibliography will be essential to of enthusiasm in Thraliana, British Synonymy, novels written during Romanticism’s later any understanding of the emergence of an and Retrospection. She also shows how Piozzi years. She analyzes how Shelley “explore[s] American literature, as well as early American distanced herself from radicalism and spoke the darker, more anarchic energies of female printing, publishing and authorship. out against “popular millenarianism” and oracular power” and how female characters Stoddard’s title is descriptive of the work’s “progressive millennialism” (88–89, 92). are “silenced, victimized, or pushed to the coverage, which is to say that it excludes Smith next focuses her attention on Helen margins of the story” (190, 193–194). Smith broadsides and leaflets. It also excludes verse Maria Williams and her Letters from France. coerces a link between prophecy and Franken- printed as part of a prose work, though it in- https://scholarworks.umass.edu/sharp_news/vol23/iss3/1 16 et al.: Volume 23, Number 3 SHARP News Vol. 23, no. 3 Summer 2014 d 17
cludes books if the verse is mentioned on the with early poetry assembled. The user can eas- European concepts associated with the book title-page. The book’s definition of American ily navigate the chronological arrangement to – intimacy, property, copyright – failed to verse is “poetry composed in what is now find the full description. map on to Native American culture. Cohen the United States of America.” It includes all Bibliographies are always works in progress. also discussed more recent aspects of Native languages, translations, and “there is no limit Their publication stimulates new discoveries American book culture, such as the move on place of publication” (vi). and they provide the raw material for new towards non-religious texts in the early twen- The result is a descriptive listing of 1,332 interpretations. This landmark volume will be tieth century and the renaissance of Native editions, representing 1,041 titles. Logically, an important springboard for research in book American culture after World War II, a renais- the work is arranged chronologically, showing history for generations to come. sance in which the book played a central role. the historical development of the writing and Underpinning this survey was a deep sense publication of American poetry. The descrip- Philip B. Eppard of ambiguity. The book has frequently been a tion of the elements for each entry takes University at Albany, State University of New York threat to Native American culture; it has been up four pages. Key elements include entry used to impose a new religion, to legitimize number, author heading, transcription of the theft of land, and to deprecate Native title-page and imprint, collations by signatures Lecture Reviews Americans. At the same time, however, the and by pages, copyright data, bindings, cross book has provided Native Americans with references for reprints, copies examined, and the means to resist these threats. provenance of copies. Stoddard also provides bibliographical citations to standard reference Matt Cohen – “A Brief History Michael Gamer – “Re- works such as Wegelin (naturally), Evans, of Books in Indigenous North collection’s Intranquility” Sabin, Shaw & Shoemaker, and others. The America” Toronto Centre for the Book, in associa- introduction also includes a “Conspectus of Toronto Centre for the Book, in association the Bibliography,” a short-title chronologi- tion with the Centre for Innovation Law cal listing, which Stoddard describes as his with the Centre for the Study of the United and Policy at the Faculty of Law, University favorite index, “so that you can scan a decade States, University of Toronto of Toronto of publications in moments in order to make 7 November 2013 30 January 2014 a perception or find the right book for your purpose” (xvii). Following the lecture by Adrian Johns Michael Gamer’s lecture took as its start- The bibliography is prefaced with Stod- reviewed in SHARP News 23.1, the 2013–14 ing point the concept of re-collection, or dard’s “Poet and Printer in Colonial and Toronto Centre for the Book lecture series the reprinting, often in reworked form, of Federal America: Some Bibliographical Per- continued with presentations by Matt Cohen, the published works of an author. Gamer’s spectives,” which reflects on the compilation Michael Gamer, and Francis Cody. These lec- main focus was on English poetry, and of the work and provides a series of short tures provided ample evidence for the diver- Wordsworth in particular. In Wordsworth’s commentaries mostly accompanied by indices sity and interdisciplinarity to be found in the 1815 edition of his collected works, Gamer on various aspects of the printing and dis- field of book history; not only did they span argued, the poet attempted to arrange this semination of early American poetry. These the globe, moving from North America to literary body of work in such a way as to topics include dedications, subscriptions, Britain to South India, they also drew attention reflect his physical body. Gamer did not make recitations, popular texts, publishers’ bindings to points of connection between book history it clear how Wordsworth tried to achieve this, in paper, illustrations, wood or metal cuts, and and the fields of indigenous studies, legal his- perhaps because he was chiefly interested in engravings. The commentaries in each section tory, and political science, among others. the motivation that lay behind Wordsworth’s discuss the historical circumstances influenc- attempt rather than in the attempt itself. ing the topic, suggest their implications for Matt Cohen’s lecture took the form of This motivation is to be found, according to the publishing of verse, and hint at future an historical survey of interactions between Gamer, in an unlikely source: the 1814 revi- research possibilities. For example, the subject Native American peoples and the book. sion to copyright law that not only lengthened of subscription publishing is considered, the Cohen identified religion as the main route the period of copyright from fourteen to reasons for it, and the difficulty in determin- by which the book entered Native American twenty-eight years, but also stipulated that ing whether a book was actually published culture, pointing out that the first Bible to be if the author was still alive at the end of this on a subscription basis. This is followed by a published in North America was in a native period then copyright would be extended for listing of “Books of Verse Published by Sub- language. Another, and related, issue raised the rest of his life. This extension of copy- scription Through 1820,” indicating whether by Cohen was orality. The introduction of right for life enshrined, according to Gamer, a list of subscribers is included, the number the book into Native American communities the link between an author’s literary corpus, of subscribers, and the number of copies did not, Cohen suggested, result in a simple as protected by copyright, and his physical listed. It would have been helpful if titles in transition from orality to literacy. Rather, the body, with the author’s death allowing the dis- these indices also had their entry numbers to oral nature of Native American culture made solution of both. The lecture’s combination facilitate reference to the main description of reading aloud to a group a common practice, of literary interpretation and legal analysis the book, but that is a small quibble given the especially in religious contexts. Here, in fact, made for a challenging, but very rewarding, value of having these detailed lists of titles we have an important point of contact with examination of one author’s attempt to con- representing different phenomena associated European practice, though in other respects trol the afterlife of his work. ... / 18
Published by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst, 2014 17 SHARP News, Vol. 23, No. 3 [2014], Art. 1 18 c Summer 2014 SHARP News Vol. 23, no. 3
... / 17 Francis Cody – “Publics and Harvard men theorize that their friend Jack’s Crowds Revisited: On the Role of Exhibition Reviews fascination with a Miss Butler is largely caused by her attractive “Sorosis” shoes. Assuming a Print Capitalism in South Indian stability afforded by his elite education, Jack Politics” Parables of Promise: American dreams of keeping Miss Butler “in shoes for Toronto Centre for the Book, in association Advertising Fiction, 1856–2014 life.” In this relatively innocuous example, and with the Friends of the Victoria University DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist more explicitly in the other printed material Library, University of Toronto University, Dallas, Texas on display, visitors may develop the sense of 5 March 2014 27 March – 30 May 2014 an unspoken discomfort with some content that is not fully addressed. Francis Cody’s lecture explored the rela- This exhibition brings together an impres- This dissonance is perhaps most pro- tionship between, on the one hand, the con- sive corpus of printed advertisements in the nounced in a book of paper dolls published cepts of the public sphere and publicity and, guise of fictions promoting a wide variety by the California and Hawaiian Sugar Refin- on the other, newspaper readership and its of products for the American consumer. As ing Corporation, The Sugar Doll Family and political implications. Prefacing his remarks noted in the brochure, the material presented Their Favorite Recipes (San Francisco, 1931, c with a detailed discussion of various theories explores periods before, during, and beyond tall 8 vo. 20 pp. + color pictorial wraps, il- of the public sphere and publicity that have the “golden age” of the advertising fiction lustrated throughout in color). Six paper been put forward, especially in the liberal genre, considered to be roughly 1890–1930. dolls correspond to the six types of sugar tradition, Cody went on to provide a detailed Perhaps because of this ambitious chronol- produced by C&H, including – as the label account of the fieldwork he has conducted ogy, the exhibition is organized both themati- reads – Granny (i.e. granulated sugar), Topsy on newspaper readership and political activ- cally and spatially by a number of categories: Doll (i.e. brown “sugah”), and Chinese Doll ity in Tamil-speaking regions of South India. ‘Food and Drink’; ‘Commerce, Business, Sales, (“Me Flum China!”). While it is admirable to Particularly fascinating was Cody’s analysis and Schemes’; ‘Clothing’; ‘Health and Patent acknowledge these difficult historical topics, of the teashop as a venue where men from Medicine’; ‘Communication and Travel’; and the exhibition could have pushed such issues a variety of castes gather and listen to news- ‘Household Products.’ While buoyant on the further to contextualize and nuance the exist- papers being read aloud. This reading aloud, surface, these culturally rich and often densely ence and popularity of the material. which has continued in spite of the relatively charged records of consumption offer up However, these examples are counteracted high literacy rates achieved by around 2000, perfectly packaged fictions that attempt to by the exhibition’s display of cheerful fictions is used to precipitate political debate. Cody cleanse the commodity of its at times violent promoting useful and innovative products. also presented case studies of the political or imperialist origins. The extended timeline allows visitors to activity of particular families in the South Guest curator Marc Selvaggio delivers not draw connections across advertisements and Indian political elite, focusing especially on only an in-depth representation of the mate- the social climates in which they were cre- the use made of newspapers, though the laby- rial culture surrounding advertising fiction, ated. For example, a children’s book by C.B. rinthine nature of Indian politics sometimes but also the shifts in visual culture affecting Woofter and Don E. Hatley, illustrated by Jack made these case studies hard to follow. Cody nineteenth- and twentieth-century viewers. Olson, titled The Adventures of Toby Brite and concluded by arguing that the theorization of Printed in 1924 by the Davis Baking Powder Bobby (St. Paul: C.B. Donald Company, 1953; the public sphere and publicity in the liberal Company (New York and Chicago, 12 mo. second printing May 1955, 25 pp. + picto- tradition has ultimately proved inadequate, 16 pp. + color pictorial wrappers), Alice in rial wraps) encourages dental hygiene with a and called for a rethink of these concepts Baking Powder Land portrays the story of a talking toothbrush that shuttles children to a from an illiberal perspective. young woman who falls into the illustration dentist on the moon. This fanciful booklet Timothy Perry on the label of a large can of Davis Baking takes viewers from advertisements boasting University of Toronto Powder – in a play on Lewis Carroll’s Alice the invention of the radio and telephone in Wonderland. The viewer is encouraged to in another section of the exhibition to the participate in this three-dimensional journey beginnings of the Space Race. Moving On via ten “sculptural printing” images to be Parables of Promise offers DeGolyer the op- viewed through the included “Macyscope,” an portunity to display a significant number of eyepiece made by American Colortype com- recent acquisitions while also representing the Millie Jackson, our faithful North Amer- plete with now familiar red and blue lenses. library’s vast holdings of material culture and ica Book Reviews Editor, is hanging up her The ten prints demand human interaction in business history ephemera of the nineteenth SHARP News pen. Our sincere thanks for order to incorporate depth into otherwise and twentieth centuries. This rich body of her sterling service in this bourgeoning area out-of-focus images. material invites scholarship both within and of scholarship. We have a new team starting Parables of Promise displays printed materi- beyond the larger academic institution in with the next issue. Watch SHARP-L for an als that entice other senses as well, such as which it is held. announcement. In the meantime, if anyone A.E. Little and Company’s 1899 A College Story Rheagan E. Martin would like to act as our Latin American (Lynn, Massachusetts, 19 pp. + color pictorial J. Paul Getty Museum correspondent, alerting us to new titles and wrappers). The novella combines nine half- possible reviewers please contact
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Comics Unmasked: Art and Ourselves,’ ‘Politics: Power and the People,’ maintained a fantastic collection of comics Anarchy in the UK ‘Let’s Talk about Sex,’ ‘Hero with a Thou- old and new, and this should serve as good British Library, London sand Faces,’ and ‘Breakdowns: The Outer advertising for what has been thus far a rela- Limits of Comics.’ These titles are pretty tively underutilised scholarly resource. 2 May – 19 August 2014 self-explanatory. Each section has a rough Unfortunately, the exhibition’s strength is historical arrangement; ‘To See Ourselves,’ for also its greatest weakness. This is definitely The Comics Unmasked exhibition, which example, begins with the Victorian era comic not a good introductory lesson on British opened at the British Library on 2 May, repre- strip working class anti-hero Ally Sloper and comics; if you had not already heard of D.C. sents at least two firsts for that venerable insti- ends with contemporary works like Nicola Thomson & Co., you would have no reason tution: it is the first ever exhibition held there Streeten’s Billy, Me, & You, an autobiographical to now know that The Beano is a classic Scot- to focus upon the subject of comics, and it account of an English mother coming to grips tish cartoon strip. Nor had I ever realised, is the first ever to require parental guidance with having lost her son to illness. until it was mentioned in passing, that Garth for children under the age of sixteen. And The lighting is dim to protect some of Ennis, of US-based Marvel and DC Comics I would hazard a guess that the fluorescent the more delicate manuscripts, and a dark fame, is from Northern Ireland. Indeed, the pink colour being used on fonts, banners, and background palette combined with clumps of exhibition was perhaps too preoccupied with other official promotional materials is likely mannequins wearing street clothes and Guy the explication of its themes at the expense to be a first as well. Fawkes masks (allusion to the anarchist Alan of other categories of basic background This brainchild of British Library cura- Moore comic V for Vendetta), gives one the knowledge. Although some sample scripts tor Adrian Edwards and comics critics Paul impression of visiting an illicit underground and original artwork were on display to show Gravett and John Harris Dunning features space – a Batcave, perhaps or, less generously, how complicated a collage comics production over two hundred items from private col- a teenage boy’s fantasy basement bedroom. really is, there were no systematic biographi- lections and the BL’s own extensive archive, There is plenty of interactive multimedia cal sketches of writers or artists, nor was making it the UK’s largest ever exhibition support throughout, from looping video to there much material history or even publica- of comics. Comics Unmasked is a celebration vintage audio recordings, as well as iPads with tion information about the works on display. specifically of British comics – defined, it the full texts of fifteen of the exhibition’s Maybe comics are intrinsically subversive and seems, as comics whose artistic creation has comics available for reading. The guest book anarchist, but they are also a mass-produced included British people – and while there is, is a table with drawing paper and pencils for commercial medium, and some indication of course, nothing new about telling stories doodling, and visitors are also exhorted to of whether the book I was looking at had with pictures, and humankind was doing that begin making their own comics upon exiting an original print run of 20 or 20,000 would even before it developed writing, the curators the gallery. have been appreciated. see comics in the UK context as a uniquely The great strength of Comics Unmasked is In sum, then, Comics Unmasked might not subversive, even anarchic force throughout its emphasis upon obscure and lesser known be the best first British Library comics exhi- history. Because they have been a frequent works. As it is, the UK is not as famous for bition in the best of all possible worlds. But target of moral and even legal condemna- its tradition of sequential art as, say, France, it is, nonetheless, a truly excellent one, well tion, British comics have pushed the envelope Japan, or even the United States. Yet while worth the price of admission to any scholar on subjects ranging from sex to religion to the exhibition includes well known comics of the history of comics, print, or visual politics. strips such as Andy Capp and famous writers media. The curators are to be applauded for The exhibition gallery is laid out in a such as Neil Gaiman, most of the items on their achievement. roughly circular path, guiding visitors through display will be unfamiliar even to avid com- Casey Brienza six discrete, thematically arranged sections ics fans. Indeed, the British Library has long City University London focused on ‘Mischief and Mayhem,’ ‘To See
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versity of Notre Dame Press, 2013. ISBN The Artist as Critic. Basingstoke, Hamp- Bibliography 9780268040338. shire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ISBN: Howard Sklar. The Art of Sympathy in Fic- 9781137292407. tion: Forms of Ethical and Emotional Persuasion. Susheila Nasta, ed. India in Britain: South Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Ben- Asian Networks and Connections, 1858–1950. General jamins, 2013. ISBN 9789027233509. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ISBN Natalia Maillard Alvarez, ed. Books in Paul Socken. The Edge of the Precipice: Why 9780230392717. the Catholic World During the Early Modern Read Literature in the Digital Age? Montreal and Lucy Pearson. The Making of Modern Chil- Period. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014. ISBN Kingston, ON: McGill-Queens University dren’s Literature in Britain: Publishing and Criti- 9789004262898. Press, 2013. ISBN 9780773541788. cism in the 1960s and 1970s. Farnham, Surrey, Robert Dawson. The Public Library: A Pho- Robert A. Stebbins. The Committed Reader: England and Burlington, VT: 2013. ISBN tographic Essay. New York: Princeton Architec- Reading for Utility, Pleasure, and Fulfillment in the 9781409443414. tural Press, 2014. ISBN 9781616892173. Twenty-First Century. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, Nicole R. Rice. Middle English Religious Sas Mays, ed. Libraries, Literatures, and 2013. ISBN 9780810885967. Writing in Practice: Texts, Readers, and Trans- Archives. New York and London: Routledge, Thomas E. Wartenberg. A Sneetch Is a formations. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. ISBN 2014. ISBN 9780415843874. Sneetch and Other Philosophical Discoveries: Find- 9782503541020. Jason Merkoski. Burning the Page: The ing Wisdom in Children’s Literature. Chichester, Susanne Schmid. British Literary Salons of Ebook Revolution and the Future of Reading. West Sussex, UK: John Wiley, 2013. ISBN the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2013. ISBN 9780470656785. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ISBN 9781402288838. 9780230110656. David Mikics. Slow Reading in a Hur- China Sarah Wall-Randell. The Immaterial Book: ried Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press Yi Zheng. Contemporary Chinese Print Me- Reading and Romance in Early Modern England. of Harvard University Press, 2013. ISBN dia: Cultivating Middle Class Taste. New York: Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 9780674724723. Routledge, 2013. ISBN 9780415559690. 2013. ISBN 9780472118779. Paulo Moreira. Literary and Cultural Rela- David Watt. The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s tions between Brazil and Mexico: Deep Undercur- France Series. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, rents. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Serge Paugam and Camila Giorgetti. Des 2013. ISBN 9780859898690. ISBN 9781137379863. pauvres à la bibliothèque: enquête au Centre Pom- Stephanie Newell. The Power to Name: A pidou. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, United States History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa. 2013. ISBN 9782130619024. Matt Cohen and Jeffrey Glover, eds. Co- Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2013. Anne Réach-Ngô. L’écriture éditoriale à la lonial Mediascapes: Sensory Worlds of the Early ISBN 9780821420324. Renaissance: genèse et promotion du récit sentimental Americas. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Cornelius Plantinga. Reading for Preaching: français (1530–1560). Genève: Librairie Droz, Press, 2014. ISBN 9780803232396. The Preacher in Conversation with Storytellers, Biog- 2013. ISBN 9782600016056. Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez, ed. With raphers, Poets, and Journalists. Grand Rapids, MI a Book in Their Hands: Chicano/a Readers and and Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 2013. ISBN Germany Readerships across the Centuries. Albuquerque: 9780802870773. Matt Erlin and Lynne Tatlock, eds. Distant University of New Mexico Press, 2014. ISBN Manuel Portela. Scripting Reading Motions: Readings: Topologies of German Culture in the Long 9780826354761. The Codex and the Computer as Self-Reflexive Nineteenth Century. Rochester, NY: Camden James Phelan. Reading the American Novel Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. House, 2014. ISBN 9781571135391. 1920–2010. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2013. ISBN 9780262019460. ISBN 9780631230670. Paul Raabe. Tradition und Innovation: Stu- Italy Joan Shelley Rubin. Cultural Considerations: dien und Anmerkungen zur Bibliotheksgeschichte. Caterina Ramonda. La Biblioteca per Essays on Readers, Writers, and Musicians in Post- Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, ragazzi. Milano: Bibliografica, 2013. ISBN war America. Amherst: University of Massa- 2013. ISBN 9783465041870. 9788870757422. chusetts Press, 2013. ISBN 9781625340139. Alfred A. Reisch. Hot Books in the Cold Gary D. Schmidt. Making Americans: War: The CIA-Funded Secret Book Distribution Russia Children’s Literature from 1930 to 1960. Iowa Program Behind the Iron Curtain. Budapest: Cen- Aleksandr Samarin. Tipografshchiki i Knigo- City: University of Iowa Press, 2013. ISBN tral European University Press, 2013. ISBN chëty: Ocherki Po Istorii Knigi v Rossii Vtoroĭ 9781609381929. 9786155225239. Poloviny XVIII Veka. Moscow: Pashkov Dom, Courtney Weikle-Mills. Imaginary Citi- Robert Campbell Roberts, Scott H. Moore, 2013. ISBN 9785751005399. zens: Child Readers and the Limits of American and Donald D. Schmeltekopf, eds. Finding a Independence, 1640–1868. Baltimore: Johns Common Thread: Reading Great Texts from Homer United Kingdom Hopkins University Press, 2013. ISBN to O’Connor. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Femke Molekamp. Women and the Bible in 9781421407210. Press, 2013. ISBN 9781587312540. Early Modern England: Religious Reading and David Willbern. The American Popular Novel Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse. Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, after World War II: A Study of 25 Best Sellers, Bound Fast with Letters: Medieval Writers, 2013. ISBN 9780199665402. 1947–2000. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013. Readers, and Texts. Notre Dame, IN: Uni- Olivia Murphy. Jane Austen the Reader: ISBN 9780786474509. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/sharp_news/vol23/iss3/1 20