The Little Professor

This Week's Acquisitions

• Cecilia Mary Caddell, Tales of the Festivals, Second Series (P. J. Kenedy, 1896).  Short stories intended to explain various Catholic holy days.  You can read it here.  (eBay)
• Jane Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England (Yale, 2006).  Eighteenth-century Protestants try to make sense of miraculous happenings.  (Amazon [secondhand])

This Week's Acquisitions

• Ma Jian, Beijing Coma, trans. Flora Drew (Picador, 2008).  A comatose man shot at Tiananmen Square slowly returns to consciousness.  (Review copy)
• Ann Harries, No Place for a Lady (Bloomsbury, 2007).  Historical novel set during the Boer War.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Anne Enright, Yesterday's Weather (Grove, 2009).  Short stories.  (Lift Bridge)
• Linda Peterson, Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market (Princeton, 2009).  Studies the different ways in which women had--and imagined--careers as writers in the nineteenth century.  I'm reviewing this for Choice.  (Review copy)

This Week's Acquisitions

• Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them (Virago, 1988).  Historical novel set in a fourteenth-century convent.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Elizabeth von Arnim, Vera (Washington Square, 1995).  Romance turns somewhat unsettling in Jane Eyre-ish fashion.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Michael Campbell, Lord Dismiss Us (Phoenix, 1984).  Goings-on at an English public school.  (Donation from colleague)
• Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall On Your Knees (Touchstone,  2002).  Canadian family saga, involving various dark secrets, betrayals, lust, that sort of thing.  (Donation from colleague)
• William R. McKelvy, The English Cult of Literature: Devoted Readers, 1774-1880 (Virginia, 2007).  Studies how literary reading became, in effect, "religious."  (Amazon [secondhand])

This Week's Acquisitions

• Peter Manseau, Songs for the Butcher's Daughter (Free Press, 2009).  An American Catholic translates the Yiddish memoirs of a Russian Jewish poet.  (Lift Bridge)
• Hilary Mantel, A Change of Climate (Picador, 2003).  Two former African missionaries deal with the memories of a horrible event.  (eBay)
• Ian Townsend, The Devil's Eye (HarperCollins, 2008). Novel set in Australia during 1899, as Hurricane Mahina is about to touch down.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (NRYB, 2009).  An Oxford-educated man goes home to the Sudan, whereupon strange events begin to transpire.  (Amazon [secondhand])

This (Last) Week's (Slightly Belated) Acquisitions

(Introduction + painting the living room = confusion, clearly.)

• Fr. Rolfe, Hadrian the Seventh (NYRB, 2001).  Reprint of Rolfe's cult classic about an Englishman who becomes Pope, aggravates various people, and gets assassinated.  For more on the ultra-eccentric Rolfe, see here.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Sabina Muray,  The Caprices (Grove, 2007).  Short stories set during WWII.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Margaret Nancy Cutt, Ministering Angels: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Writing for Children (Five Owls, 1979).  Includes chapters on Mrs. Sherwood, A.L.O.E. (Charlotte Maria Tucker), Hesba Stretton (Sarah Smith), and Mrs. O. F. Walton.  (Abebooks)

This Week's Acquisitions

• Nancy Huston, Dolce Agonia (Vintage, 2002).  Academics gather at Thanksgiving.  (eBay)
• Richard Flanagan, Wanting (Atlantic Monthly, 2009).  Lady Jane Franklin asks Charles Dickens to step in after members of Sir John Franklin's expedition are accused of cannibalism...and wait, didn't we just do this?  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Matthew Pearl, The Last Dickens: A Novel (Random House, 2009).  Mystery surrounding The Mystery of Edwin Drood...and wait, didn't we just do this? (eBay)
• Michael A. G. Haykin and Kenneth Stewart, eds., The Advent of Evangelicalism: Exploring Historical Continuities (B&H Academic, 2008).   Essay collection reassessing David Bebbington's standard history of British evangelicalism, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain (1989).  (Amazon [secondhand])

This Week's Acquisitions

• Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk, trans. William Maynard Hutchins and Olive E. Kenny (Anchor, 1991).  First volume of Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy, set in Egypt during the 1920s.  (Lift Bridge)
• Kay Heath, Aging by the Book: The Emergence of Midlife in Victorian Britain (SUNY, 2009).  Literary-cultural study of the development of modern "middle age" during the 19th c.  I'm reviewing this for Choice.  (Review copy)

This Week's Acquisitions

(Hey, it's our library's annual book sale.  Books for a quarter, anyone?)

• Charles J. Kickham, Knocknagow; Or, the Homes of Tipperary (James Duffy, n.d.).  One of the biggest bestsellers in Irish fiction during the nineteenth century, here reprinted in its 22nd edition.  More on Kickham here.  (eBay)
• Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger (Andre Deutsch, 1987).  A historian reminisces on her deathbed.  (Library sale)
• A. N. Wilson, Daughters of Albion (Penguin, 1993).  The Lampitts deal with the 60s.  (Library sale)
• Henry Hitch and Baxter Hathaway, eds., Dramatic Essays of the Neoclassic Age (Benjamin Blom, 1965).  Anthology of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century critical essays, prefaces, satires, etc. on drama.  (Library sale)
• Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Oxford, 1999).   Emergence of modern Irish literature as Irish literature.  (eBay)
• James Whisenant, A Fragile Unity: Anti-Ritualism and the Division of Anglican Evangelicalism in the Nineeenth Century (Paternoster, 2000).  Rise, fall, and collapse of the anti-Ritualist movement.  (Amazon)

This Week's Acquisitions

(Free books are always welcome...)

• James Howard Kunstler, World Made By Hand (Grove, 2009).  Apocalyptofic, upstate NY-style.  (Lift Bridge)
• Patrick White, Voss (Penguin, 2009).  Reprint of White's historical novel, tracking a nineteenth-century Australian explorer.  (Exam copy)
• Michael Sims, ed., The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime (Penguin, 2009).  A rather slim anthology of late-Victorian/20th-c. tales about crooks of all varieties.  (Exam copy)
• Barbara Hayley, Carleton's 'Traits and Stories' and the 19th-Century Anglo-Irish Tradition (Rowman & Littlefield, 1983).  Puts William Carleton's Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry into their literary-historical context.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Margaret Keller and James H. Murphy, eds., Gender Perspectives in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Public and Private Spheres (Irish Academic P, 1997).  Collection of essays in a number of disciplines, including history, history of religion, literary criticism, etc.  (Amazon [secondhand])

This Week's Acquisitions

(Did I mention that I went to Powell's when I was in Chicago? Ssshh! Don't tell my parents.)

• William Clarke, Three Courses and a Dessert (Nonsuch, 2005).  Reprint of an 1830 collection of short stories, illustrated by George Cruikshank.  It's now better known for the illustrations than the stories.  (Powell's)
• Robert S. Surtees, Ask Mamma: Or the Richest Commoner in England (Nonsuch, 2005).  Reprint of Surtees' social satire, set among the rural hunting crowd.  Illustrated by John Leech.  (Powell's)
• Francine Prose, Judah the Pious (Macmillan, 1986).  Prose's first novel--a neo-Rabbinical tale of sorts.  (Powell's)
• Cynthia Ozick, Trust (Mariner, 2004).  Reprint of Ozick's first novel, featuring a young woman in search of her long-lost father.  (Powell's)
• Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (Walker, 2006).  Hefty study of eighteenth-century satirical culture, including artists like James Gillray.  (Powell's)
• Maureen N. McLane, Romanticism and the Human Sciences (Cambridge, 2006).  Literature and the "new" sciences of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, including the study of populations (Malthus, etc.).  (Powell's)
• Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Knowing Dickens (Cornell, 2007).  Dickensian epistemology, as it were.  (Powell's)
• Isabel Rivers, ed., Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Continuum, 2003).  Essays in book history.  (Powell's)
• Lucy Bending, The Representation of Bodily Pain in Late Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Oxford, 2000).  Hellfire, vivisection, etc.  (Powell's)
• Hughes Oliphant Old, The Age of the Reformation (Eerdmans, 2002).  One volume of Olds' history of preaching.  (eBay)