This Week's Acquisitions

(More free books this week.)

• May Sinclair, The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (Modern Library, 2003). The tragic effects of a late-Victorian upbringing on a young woman's self-consciousness.

  
  

• Clare A. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth Century British Literature (Rutgers, 1990). 19th c. medievalism, especially the afterlife of the Norman Conquest.

  
  

• Frederick Holmes, The Historical Imagination: Postmodernism and the Treatment of the Past in Contemporary British Fiction (ELS, 1997). New trends in historical fiction, with special attention to Ackroyd, Byatt, Fowles and Lively.

  
  

• David Patterson, The Shriek of Silence: A Phenomenology of the Holocaust Novel (Kentucky, 1992). Bakhtinian study, much of it devoted to Wiesel.

  
  

• Lawrence K. Langer, Preempting the Holocaust (Yale, 1998). A collection of essays on the afterlife of the Holocaust in fiction and other arts.

  
  

• Deborah Cartmell, I. Q. Hunter, and Imelda Whelehan, eds., Retrovision: Reinventing the Past in Film and Fiction (Pluto, 2001). More film than fiction; monarchy, Shakespeare, some SF.

  
  

• James Ogude, Ngugi's Novels and African History: Narrating the Nation (Pluto, 1999). Historical allegory, postcolonialism and Kenyan identity.

  
  

• Suzanne Keen, Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction (Toronto, 2001). The archive as a site for exploring issues of imperialism, the national past, the heritage industry, and so forth.

  
  

• Daniel Candel Bormann, The Articulation of Science in the Neo-Victorian Novel: A Poetics (and Two Case-Studies) (Peter Lang, 2002). Explores the competing rhetorics of science and history, with the "case studies" being Swift and Byatt.

  
  

• Mary Wilson Carpenter, Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies: Women, Sexuality, and Religion in the Victorian Market (Ohio, 2003). Explores the Victorian culture of "family Bibles" and its significance for contemporary literature.

Comments

[Ruth]

So how is the Keen book? Worth the price of admission? I can't even find a description of it, thus far.

[Miriam]

It's a pretty broad study--Keen covers historical fiction, as one might expect, but also Gothic and detective fiction. She's using the term "romance" in the sense of "quest," with the goal not the Holy Grail but, instead, the possibility of historical truth. What I've skimmed so far looks good.