The Little Professor

This Week's Acquisitions

• Sarah Wilkinson, The Subterraneous Passage and Albert of Werdendorff; The Black Forest (Zittaw, 2004).  Three reprints of early nineteenth-century Gothic chapbooks, originally published between 1802-1812.  Wilkinson was a heavy-hitting novelist for the Minerva Press. (eBay)
• Nancy Henry, The Life of George Eliot: A Critical Biography (Blackwell, 2012).  Short literary biography of Eliot; investigates the evidence, or lack thereof, for a number of myths about Eliot's personal life (e.g., why Lewes didn't divorce his wife Agnes).  I'm reviewing this for Choice.  (Review copy)

This Week's Acquisitions

• Helen Humphreys, The Frozen Thames (McClelland and Stewart, 2007).  Collection of short-shorts about exactly what it says on the title: days when the Thames froze over, from the twelfth century to the late nineteenth (with an epilogue by Virginia Woolf).  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Robert Bellarmine, On Natural and Spiritual Authority (Liberty Fund, 2012).  Three controversial works by St. Robert Bellarmine, a leading figure in the clash between Protestants and Catholics during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; more about Bellarmine here.  (Liberty Fund)

This Week's Acquisitions

• Katie Roiphe, Still She Haunts Me (Dial, 2001).  Historical novel about Lewis Carroll's relationship with Alice Liddell, especially as funneled through the photography sessions.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Carsten Jensen, We the Drowned, trans. Charlotte Barslund and Emma Ryder (Houghton Mifflin, 2011).  A family saga covering approximately a century's worth of the history of Danish maritime island Marstal.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Connie Willis, All Clear (Ballantine, 2011).  Second half of Willis' duology about time-traveling historians researching the London Blitz.  (Barnes & Noble)
• China Mieville, Railsea (Ballantine, 2012).  It's Moby-Dick! But with trains.  And, um, gargantuan moles.  (Amazon)
• William M'Gavin, The Protestant, 2 vols. (Edwin Hunt, 1833).  1500+ pages (in small print!) of M'Gavin's anti-Catholic journalism & other writings.  Electric Scotland has an overview of M'Gavin's career.  (eBay)
• Ciaran O'Carroll, Paul Cardinal Cullen: Portrait of a Practical Nationalist (Veritas, 2009).  Biographical study of the most influential figure in nineteenth-century Irish Catholicism.  (Amazon)

This Week's Acquisitions

• Eleanor Sleath, The Nocturnal Minstel; Or, the Spirit of the Wood (Ayer, 1971).  A volume in Ayer's big reprint series of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Gothic.  Overview here; a biographical essay about the little-known author here.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies (Holt, 2012).  Second volume in Mantel's planned trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, featuring things going rather badly for Anne Boleyn.  (Amazon)
• Johannes V. Jensen, The Fall of the King, trans. Alan G. Bower (Minnesota, 2012).  New translation of Jensen's famous historical novel about a young man coming into the orbit of King Christian II; originally published 1900-01.  Jensen won the Nobel Prize in 1944.   (Amazon)
• The Old Brown Coat and Its Owners (RTS, 1830[?]).  Teensy-tiny (it's about four inches tall) Christian it-narrative about, yes, a coat.  (eBay)
• William Heyen, Diana, Charles, and the Queen (BOA, 1998).  Cycle of approximately three hundred short poems (two quatrains apiece, various rhyme schemes) about exactly what it says in the title, by one of my former colleagues.  (Free)
• W. R. Ward, Early Evangelicalism: A Global History, 1660-1789 (Cambridge, 2006).  An international history of efforts leading up to the explosion of evangelicalism as a modern force in the late eighteenth century.  (Amazon [secondhand])

This Week's Acquisitions

• Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles (Ecco, 2012).  Retelling of the legend of Achilles and Patroclus from Patroclus' POV.  (Lift Bridge)
• Lynn Shepherd, The Solitary House (Delacorte, 2012).  Well, Bleak House already was a detective novel of a sort.  Here, Tulkinghorn asks private investigator Charles Maddox, a disgraced police detective, to do a little job for him.  (Amazon)
• Colm Toibin, The Empty Family: Stories (Scribner, 2011).  Short stories set everywhere from Ireland to Spain, and from the early twentieth century to the present.  (Barnes & Noble)
• Susan Barrett, Fixing Shadows (Review, 2005).  In Victorian England, a commoner's living baby is substituted for an aristocrat's dead one, with the usual results.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Fiona Shaw, The Sweetest Thing (Virago, 2004).  Neo-Victorian novel about a young working-class woman and her relationship with a Quaker who accumulates photographs of women like her (shades of Arthur Munby).  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Helen Dunmore, The Greatcoat (Hammer, 2012).  Ghost story involving a woman, an old coat, and a mysterious man who suddenly enters her life.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• C. P. Golightly, Look at Home, or Short and Easy Method with the Roman Catholics (J. H. Parker, 1837).  First polemical pamphlet by this ardent anti-Catholic campaigner.  (eBay)

This Week's Acquisitions

• Charlotte Rogan, The Lifeboat (Little Brown, 2012).  In 1914, a woman goes on trial for the fallout of events after a ship shinks.  (BOMC)
• Robert Lee Wolff, Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (Garland, 1977).  This is the big companion volume to Wolff's "Novels of Faith and Doubt" reprint series.  Thank goodness for library discards, as I've been searching for an affordable copy for eons (it usually retails at around $200 for a used copy).  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Jason David Hall, ed., Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century (Ohio, 2012).  Transformations in metrical theory and practice during the nineteenth century and their relation to other cultural phenomena.  I'm reviewing this for Choice.  (Review copy)
• Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton, 2012).  A study of how books came to be regarded as, in effect, precious objects with only one purpose.  (Review copy)
• Joyce Sugg, Ever Yours Affly: John Henry Newman and His Female Circle (Gracewing, 1996).  An account of Newman's female correspondents and friends, including several Victorian authors like Lady Georgiana Fullerton.  (Amazon [secondhand])

This Week's Acquisitions

• Chris Bohjalian, The Night Strangers (Crown, 2011).  A family moves into an old house with a mysteriously-sealed room, and...you just know that this can't possibly go well.  (eBay)
• Alexi Zentner, Touch (Norton, 2011).  A visit to his old home leads a Canadian priest to dwell on the past--both his and his family's.  (Lift Bridge)
• Walter Scott, Reliquiae Trotcosienses; Or, the Gabions of the Late Jonathan Oldbuck, Esq., of Monkbarns (Edinburgh, 2004).  Scott's whimsical catalog/architectural description of Abbotsford.  (Columbia UP)
• Christian Miscellany, and Family Visiter (1846-51).  Four volumes, including #1, of this successful Methodist journal.  (private seller)
• Carmen M. Mangion, Contested Identities: Catholic Women Religious in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales (Manchester, 2008).  Analyzes how nuns understood themselves in terms of work, gender, national origin, etc.  (Amazon)

This Week's Acquisitions

• Eliza Parsons, The Mysterious Warning, ed. Karen Morton (Valancourt, 2007).  Reprint of Parsons' 1796 Gothic novel about the adventures of a young man on the run from his eeeevil brother.  (Amazon)
• Patrick Senecal, Aliss (Alire, 2005).  Really, really dark reworking of Alice in Wonderland, featuring drugs, murder, sex--you know, the usual.  In French (has never been translated).  (Amazon [secondhand])
• April Bernard, Miss Fuller (Steerforth, 2012).  Margaret Fuller Ossoli returns home from abroad.  (Lift Bridge)
• Susan E. Colon, Victorian Parables (Continuum, 2012).  Analyzes how Biblical parables work in texts by authors from a variety of religious perspectives.  (Amazon)
• Stephen Bann et al., Painting History: Delaroche and Lady Jane Grey (National Gallery, 2010).  Exhibition catalog devoted to one of the nineteenth century's most famous history paintings, Paul Delaroche's The Execution of Lady Jane Grey.  (Amazon [secondhand])

This Week's Acquisitions

(I am determined to get Book Two out of here, darn it.  Hence lack of blogging.  But not lack of acquisitions!  Also, books as payment-in-kind from Cambridge, which is always nice.)

• Helen Oyeyemi, White is for Witching (Talese, 2009).  Twins grow up in what appears to be a haunted house.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• D. J. Taylor, Derby Day (Pegasus, 2011).  Neo-Victorian historical/mystery novel set around the Derby at Epsom Downs, featuring the detective from Taylor's Kept.  (Lift Bridge)
• Mike Goode, Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History, 1790-1890 (CUP, 2009).  Nineteenth-century masculinities and the formation of modern historical thought, both in historiography proper and historical fiction.  (CUP)
• Michael Wheeler, St. John and the Victorians (CUP, 2012).  Studies how the Victorians appropriated, rewrote, and thought about the Gospel of St. John, in a number of contexts.  (CUP)
• Devon Fisher, Roman Catholic Saints and Early Victorian Literature: Conservatism, Liberalism, and the Emergence of Secular Culture (Ashgate, 2012).  Examines how saints proliferated in Tractarian, Roman Catholic, and Protestant texts, and asks how they shaped thinking about the secularism that emerged from nineteenth-century religious pluralism.  (Ashgate, and thank goodness for author's discounts)
• Lee Palmer Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation (CUP, 2005).  Debates about the Eucharist from multiple theological perspectives, Catholic to Lutheran to Reformed.  (CUP)
• Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000 (CUP, 2006).  How the Bible helped form modern concepts of racial difference.  (CUP)

This Week's Acquisitions

• The Village in the Mountains, The Conversion of Peter Bayssiere, and History of a Bible (American Tract Society, n.d.).  Three repurposed tracts of various sorts, including a Bible it-narrative.  (eBay)
• Joyce Carol Oates, Mudwoman: A Novel (Ecco, 2012).  A woman left to die as an  infant grows up to head a major university, but still needs to come to grips with her past.   (BOMC)
• Guy Vanderhaeghe, A Good Man (Atlantic Monthly, 2012).  Is hard to find, one presumes.   Third novel of Vanderhaeghe's revisionist Western trilogy (The Englishman's Boy and The Last Crossing), featuring a postbellum Canadian expat who finds himself in the midst of war with Native Americans.  (Amazon)
• Kate Williams, The Pleasures of Men (Penguin, 2012).  Neo-Victorian novel about a young woman increasingly fascinated by a serial killer.  (I seem to have gone in for incredibly cheerful and upbeat novels this week.)  (Amazon)
• John Kucich, ed., The Oxford History of the Novel: Vol. 3, The Nineteenth-Century Novel 1820-1880 (Oxford, 2012).  What the title says: major genres, authors, themes, etc.  I'm reviewing this for Choice. (Review copy)
• Fiona MacCarthy, Edward Burne-Jones: The Last Pre-Raphaelite and the Victorian Imagination (Harvard, 2012).  New biography of one of the Pre-Raphaelite movement's most popular painters; for examples of his work, see here.  (Amazon)
• Chris Brooks, ed., The Albert Memorial (Yale, 2000).  A rather unusually-shaped book about one of the nineteenth century's biggest memorial projects; includes discussions of architecture, ornamentation, sculptures, and so forth.  For some reason, knocked down to about $6 on Amazon when I bought it.  (Amazon)