The Little Professor

This Week's Acquisitions

• Gail Godwin, Flora (Bloomsbury, 2013).  Tensions between a child and her guardian in a suspiciously Gothic household, ca. WWII.  (BOMC)
• Adelene Buckland, Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology (Chicago, 2013).  The nineteenth-century's most controversial science and its effect on literary temporality and spatiality.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Margaret H. McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism (Kentucky, 1999).  International networks (Anglo-American, Continental, etc.) and the shaping of feminist discourse.  (eBay)
• Sheridan Gilley, ed., Victorian Churches and Churchmen: Essays Presented to Vincent Alan McClelland (Boydell, 2005).  Festschrift for leading scholar of British Catholicism, primarily focusing on Catholic issues (not surprisingly) but also Methodism, Tractarianism, etc.  (Amazon [secondhand])

For people who do enjoy using books for weight-lifting

The print version of Robert Elsmere will be out at the end of this month.  Only 670 pages!

For those who would prefer not to use books for weight-lifting

It would appear that Robert Elsmere may have manifested itself on Kindle. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• The Churchman's Companion, vols. 39-40 (1866).  Two volumes of this popular Anglican periodical, featuring a smorgasboard of articles, serial fiction, and poetry.  (eBay)
• David Finkelstein, The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era (Penn State, 2002).  Archival study of the Blackwood publishing house and its handling of authors like Margaret Oliphant and Charles Reade.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Elizabeth J. Clapp and Julie Roy Jeffrey, eds., Women, Dissent, and Anti-Slavery in Britain and America, 1790-1865 (Oxford, 2011).  Transatlantic religious dissent and abolitionism, including essays on historiographical issues, Martha Gurney, Elizabeth Heyrick, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Keith A. Francis and William Gibson, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the British Sermon, 1689-1901 (Oxford, 2012).  Everything you wanted to know about the early modern/modern sermon but were probably too terrified to ask; includes evangelicals, Catholics, skeptics, preaching methods, sermons and politics, etc.  For some reason, Amazon had this knocked down to $25; they appear to have changed their minds about that price.  (Amazon)

This Week's (Belated) Acquisitions

• Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Widow Green and Her Three Nieces (S. W. Partridge, 1859).  Didactic novella about poverty, service, charitable behavior, etc.  Ellis is best known as the author of the Women, Wives, Mothers, and Daughters of England books. (eBay)
• Mme. Augustus Craven, Fleurange, trans. M. P. T. (Catholic Publication Society, 1872).  An orphaned French girl travels to Germany and, after many trials, finds love.   More on Mme. [Pauline] Craven here. (eBay)
• Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs (Knopf, 2013).  A middle-aged, frustrated artist involves herself with a new family and their problems.  (Amazon)

This Week's Acquisitions

• Richard Marsh, The Joss: A Reversion (Valancourt, 2007).  Short Gothic novel, first published in 1901, illustrating yet again why moving into decaying property is a bad idea.  (Amazon)
• Jonathan Hess, Maurice Samuels, and Nadia Valman, eds., Nineteenth-Century Jewish Literature: An Anthology (Stanford, 2013).  A new collection of British and European short fiction, including works by Grace Aguilar, Eugenie Foa, Leopold Kompert, Amy Levy, and Israel Zangwill, among several others.  (Amazon)

Book Two, now on Amazon

Book Two (officially known as Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820-1900) is now available for preorder on Amazon.  It's scheduled for release on Nov. 30, 2013. You know you want it, right? It's even affordable!

This (Last Two) Weeks' (Slightly Belated) Acquisitions

(Not that much got acquired...)

• Anne Hebert, Kamouraska (A List, 2013).  In nineteenth-century Quebec, a young woman's love life becomes...complicated.  (Lift Bridge)
• Gail Turley Houston, Victorian Women Writers, Radical Grandmothers, and the Gendering of God (Ohio, 2013).  Analyzes how women writers imagined "goddess" figures (ranging from the Virgin Mary to Greek goddesses) in order to advance social reform.  I'm reviewing this for Choice.  (Review copy)

This Week's Acquisitions

• Francis Lathom, The One-Pound Note and Other Tales, ed. Max Fincher (Valancourt, 2013).  Reprint of three novellas first published in 1820.  Some more of the elusive Lathom's work here.  (Amazon)
• Bram Stoker, Lady Athlyne (Valancourt, 2007).  Reprint of Stoker's 1908 novel about a man who falls in love with the woman who is pretending to be his wife (confused yet?).  (Amazon)
• Harry Karlinsky, The Evolution of Inanimate Objects: The Life and Collected Works of Thomas Darwin (1857-1879) (Insomniac, 2010).  A faux biography of a shortlived, possibly insane Victorian figure who is/is not kin to the more familiar Darwin.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Robert Edric, The Book of the Heathen: A Novel of the Congo (St. Martin's, 2002).  In the late-19th c. Congo, a man prepares to go on trial for murder.  What happened? (Amazon [secondhand])

This Week's Acquisitions

(Oh look! All the books from the Strand arrived!)

• Essie Fox, Elijah's Mermaid (Orion, 2012).  In Victorian London, a brother and sister encounter a mysterious orphan.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Neil M. Gunn, Butcher's Broom (Souvenir, 1977).  Reprint of Gunn's historical novel about the Highland Clearances.  (Strand)
• W. Somerset Maugham, The Magician (Vintage, 2000).  Historical-cum-Gothic novel set in early 20th-c. Paris, featuring evil, the supernatural, young love, vengeance, etc.  (Strand)
• Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs (Faber and Faber, 2010).  Naive student finds adventure and romance by ignoring what exists of her common sense.  (Strand)
• George Meredith, Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads, ed. Rebecca N. Mitchell and Criscilla Ann Bedford (Yale, 2013).  New scholarly edition of Meredith's verse novel in its original poetic context.  (Strand)
• T. D. McKinney and Terry Wylis, Kissing Sherlock Holmes (Amber Quill, 2011).   It's Sherlock Holmes! It's gay romance! It was half of a gift to me from Bob, who chose a very ironic counterpart (see below)! (Gift)
• Valerie Weaver-Zercher, Thrill of the Chaste: The Allure of Amish Romance Novels (Johns Hopkins, 2013).  Critical study of the Amish romance genre, which is a big seller in the evangelical fiction market.  It's also the second part of my gift... (Gift)
• Gillian Gill, We Two: Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals (Ballantine, 2009).  A revisionist account of their marriage.  (Strand)
• Judith Flanders, A Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne Jones, Agnes Poynter, and Louisa Baldwin (Norton, 2005).  Group biography of the four MacDonald sisters and their marriages into the Victorian intellectual and artistic elite.  (Strand)
• Richard J. Evans, Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent (Cambridge, 2009).  Historiographical study of the British interest in the European continent, down to the present day.  (Strand)
• Mark Hutchinson and John Wolffe, A Short History of Global Evangelicalism (Cambridge, 2012).  What the title says--an overview of evangelicalism as a world-wide phenomenon, from the beginnings to the present.  (Strand)
• David Bebbington, Victorian Religious Revivals: Culture and Piety in Local and Global Contexts (Cambridge, 2012).  Examines the revivalist phenomenon in Britain, the USA, and the Empire more generally, looking at changing strategies for organizing and effecting conversion.  (Strand)
• Stewart J. Brown and Peter B. Nockles, eds., The Oxford Movement: Europe and the Wider World 1830-1930 (Cambridge, 2012).  Intersections of Oxford Movement theology and social thought with what was percolating within Britain, on the Continent, and in the Empire.  (Strand)
• John Henry Lewis Rowlands, Church, State, and Society: The Attitudes of John Keble, Richard Hurrell Froude, and John Henry Newman, 1827-45 (Churchman, 1989).  Survey of key Oxford Movement thinkers & their understanding of how the Church ought to shape society at large in an era of change.  (Amazon [secondhand])