The Little Professor

This Week's Acquisitions

(Grading is finished! I can blog again!)

• Ron Hansen, A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion (Scribner, 2011).  A noirish tale of lust and murder, featuring a sexy woman, her much-loathed husband, and her lover.  Based on a real 1927 murder case.  (Lift Bridge)
• John Harwood, The Asylum (Houghton Mifflin, 2013).  In late-Victorian England, a young woman tries to figure out why she committed herself to an insane asylum--and why she is now trapped there.  (Amazon)
• Janice Holmes, Religious Revivals in Britain and Ireland, 1859-1905 (Irish Academic Press, 2000).  Comparative study of Victorian revivalism and the responses thereto.  (Amazon [secondhand])

 

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])

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)

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])

This Week's Acquisitions

(Minus what I purchased from the Strand, as those books are currently in the hands of the post office.)

• Jim Crace, Harvest (Talese, 2013).  Mysterious goings-on upset the members of a remote village.  (Amazon)
• Ellen Datlow and Terri Windlow, eds., Queen Victoria's Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy (Tor, 2013).  Alternate nineteenth-century England! With magic! (Amazon)
• Kate Atkinson, Life after Life (Doubleday, 2013).  Young woman is born, and dies.  Or lives.  A novel of multiple plots, in which things happen sometimes one way, sometimes another.  (Amazon [UK])
• Mark Dunn, Ibid.: A Life (MacAdam/Cage, 2004).  A fictional biography told entirely in footnotes.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl, trans. Joel Rotenberg (NYRB, 2008).  Two frustrated souls meet in Austria between the wars.  (Book Off)
• A. M. Homes, The End of Alice (Granta, 1996).  Correspondence between an imprisoned pedophile and a female "admirer" from outside.  (Book Off)
• Max Byrd, Shooting the Sun (Bantam, 2004).  In the 1830s, a female scientist goes on a quest to capture a total solar eclipse.  (Book Off)
• J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, 1983).  Reprint of Burrow's classic historiographical study.  (Amazon)

This Week's Acquisitions

• Benjamin Farjeon, Miriam Rozella (Collins, 1924).  Reprint of Farjeon's 1898 novel (apparently in conjunction with a dramatization, if the photographs are any indication), about a young woman's eventually tragic experiences as she attempts to support herself.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Kate Southwood, Falling to Earth (Europa, 2013).  The sole family left unscathed after a terrifying tornado finds itself increasingly alienated from the rest of the town.  (Lift Bridge)
• Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed (Ecco, 2013).  Historical Gothic set in Princeton, featuring ghosts and various and sundry famous folk.  (BOMC)
• Hilary Schor, Curious Subjects: Women and the Trials of Realism (OUP, 2013).  Investigates relationship between the realistic mode, the "curious woman" (and curious objects), and the transformation of female subjectivity during the nineteenth century.  I'm reviewing this for Choice.  (Review copy)