The Little Professor

This Week's Acquisitions

• Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada (Scribner, 1998).  Very, very revisionist take on Uncle Tom's Cabin, among other things.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Lionel Trilling, The Middle of the Journey (NYRB, 2002).  Reprint of Trilling's novel about the trials and travails of leftist intellectuals at midcentury. (eBay)
• Joshua Harmon, Quinnehtukqut (Starcherone, 2007).  Experimental historical novel, following a young girl's experiences in New Hampshire. (Amazon [secondhand])
• Ruth Brandon, Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres (Walker, 2008).  New historical study.  See also.  (HBC)
• Patricia Allderidge, Richard Dadd (St. Martin's, 1974).  Study of the Victorian fairy painter, whose best-known work is probably The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke (see also Dadd's explanation).  (eBay)
• The Penny Pulpit: A Collection of Accurately-Reported Sermons by the Most Eminent Ministers of Various Denominations (1851-52).  Bound volume of Protestant sermons.  You can see a later volume here.  (eBay)
• Bulletins of the Society of Saint Vincent-de-Paul (1853-54).  Bound volume, the only one issued in English.  (eBay)

This Week's Acquisitions

• Lin Enger, Undiscovered Country: A Novel (Little, Brown).  Hamlet, albeit in Minnesota.  (Review copy)
• Daniel Wallace, Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician: A Novel (Doubleday, 2007).  Faust, albeit in the 1950s.  (QPB)
• Bibliotheca Sacra and American Biblical Repository 10 (1853). One volume of a well-known (and still active) American theological magazine, reprinted in the UK; Biblical criticism, comparative religion, etc. (eBay)

This Week's Acquisitions

• Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (Bantam Spectra, 2000).  Neo-Victorian meets steampunk meets Shanghai meets nanotech.  (Lift Bridge)
• Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, eds., Steampunk (Tachyon, 2008).  New anthology, although some of the stories are older.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• John W. O'Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Harvard, 2002).  How did early modern Catholicism get its name(s)? (Amazon [secondhand])

This Week's Acquisitions

• Phebe Gibbes, Hartly House, Calcutta, ed. Michael Franklin (OUP, 2007).  Scholarly edition of this pioneering Anglo-Indian novel, first published in 1789.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Cynthia Ozick, Dictation: A Quartet (Houghton Mifflin, 2008).  Four short stories, including one about the put-upon secretaries of Henry James and Joseph Conrad.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (Vintage, 1995).  Second volume in McCarthy's Border Trilogy.  (Lift Bridge)
• Emmerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations (Liberty Fund, 2008).  New edition of pioneering work on international jurisprudence; part of the Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics series.  (Liberty Fund [standing order])
• Lionel Trilling, The Journey Abandoned: The Unfinished Novel, ed. Geraldine Murphy (Columbia, 2008).  Trilling's incomplete second novel, about an intellectual at mid-century.  (Columbia [review copy for book event])

This Week's Acquisitions

(But it's a substantial acquisition, at any rate.)

• Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, from the Norman Conquest.  Compiled from Official Records & Other Authentic Documents, 8 vols. (George Bell, 1882).  Complete set of a late-Victorian edition.  Silently co-authored with her sister Elizabeth.  There are large quantities of Strickland at the Internet Archive, including some of her fiction.  Colorado College has digitized some of Strickland's letters; see also Katherine Harris' bibliography of Strickland in the literary annuals.  (eBay)
  

This Week's Acquisitions

• Gil Adamson, The Outlander (Ecco, 2008).  In early twentieth-century Idaho, a desperate woman flees for safety after murdering her husband.  (BOMC)
• R. M. Gilchrist, A Night on the Moor & Other Tales of Dread (Wordsworth, 2006). Reprints of Gilchrist's late-19th/early-20th c. horror stories.  (eBay)
• Maria LaMonaca, Masked Atheism: Catholicism and the Secular Victorian Home (Ohio, 2008).  Protestant and Catholic novelists and poets on the role of religion in the making of domesticity.  (Amazon)
• Michael E. Schiefelbein, The Lure of Babylon: Seven Protestant Novelists and Britain's Roman Catholic Revival (Mercer, 2001).  Studies the aesthetic responses of several canonical novelists. (Amazon [secondhand])
• David Mathew, Lord Acton and His Times (Alabama, 1968).  Older critical-biographical study of the Catholic intellectual.  (eBay)

This Week's Acquisitions

(I did indeed go to the Strand while in NYC.)

• Stevie Davies, Four Dreamers and Emily (St. Martin's, 1997).  Bronteites find themselves (and others) at a conference.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Joyce Carol Oates, Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway (Ecco, 2008).  Deaths of various American literati.  (Lift Bridge)
• Elsa Morante, History: A Novel, trans. William Weaver (Steerforth, 2000).  Italians struggle to survive during WWII.  (Strand)
• Jonathan Lethem, Girl in Landscape (F&F, 2004).  Adolescent girl leaves Brooklyn behind, grows up on another planet. (Strand)
• Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (Harper, 1997).  Recent reprint of ultra-popular, Brontesque Gothic romance.  (Strand)
• Jean Stafford, The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford (FSG, 2005).   Reprint of Stafford's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection.  (Strand)
• Patrick McGrath, Trauma (Knopf, 2008).  Psychiatrist finds things going awry in the most recent of McGrath's neo-Gothics. (Strand)
• Jerome Charyn, Johnny One-Eye: A Tale of the American Revolution (Norton, 2008).   Satirical picaresque set in Manhattan during the Revolution. (Strand)
• Benjamin Black [a.k.a. John Banville], The Silver Swan: A Novel (Holt, 2008).  Second novel in Black's/Banville's projected noir trilogy about Garret Quirke.  (Strand)
• Alex Warwick and Martin Willis, eds., Victorian Literature Handbook (Continuum, 2008).   Introductory essays/case studies in historical, theoretical, and critical topics; features an essay by yours truly.   (Continuum [author's copy])

This Week's Acquisitions (slightly delayed)

(Both books were gifts from Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt.)

• David Biale, Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol between Jews and Christians (U of California, 2007).  Studies the diverging theological and cultural functions of blood in the two religions traditions.
• Akihito Suzuki, Madness at Home: The Psychiatrist, the Patient, and the Family in England, 1820-1860 (U of California, 2006).  Home treatment for the insane during the Victorian period. 

This Week's Acquisitions

(Despite the length of the list, nearly everything on it was either free, for review, or courtesy of an Amazon gift certificate [thanks, W. W. Norton!].) 

• Joseph Hocking, "Lest We Forget" (Ward & Lock, c. 1901).  One of the last Victorian historical novels about the Marian persecutions, this one from a Methodist POV.  Some background & a bibliography here.  (AbeBooks)
• Michael Pritchett, The Melancholy Fate of Capt. Lewis (Unbridled, 2007).  Unhappy high school history teacher attempts to write a biography.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Geoff Ryman, Was (Penguin, 1993).  Triple plot: a dying man obsessed with The Wizard of Oz, the life of Judy Garland, and the "real" Dorothy Gale.  A reacquisition, really, as I got rid of a damaged copy a few years back.  (From a colleague)
• W. G. Sebald, Vertigo, trans. Michael Hulse (New Directions, 2000).  Meditations (in transit) on memory, featuring Sebald, Kafka, and Stendhal.  (From a colleague)
• ---, The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (New Directions, 1997).  Entwined biographies of four Jews in exile.  (From a colleague)
• ---, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New Directions, 1999).  Sebald treks across England.  (From a colleague)
• Bernhard Schlink, The Reader (Vintage, 1999).  An adolescent boy makes a horrifying discovery about the woman with whom he is obsessed.  (From a colleague)
• Graham Greene, Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party (Simon & Schuster, 1980).  Short satirical novel about a man who humiliates his greedy guests.  I have vague memories of the BBC adaptation.  (From a colleague)
• Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves: A Novel (Harper, 2008).  The decades-long aftermath of a 1911 murder and its repercussions for the local Indian community.  (BOMC)
• Kate Christensen, The Great Man (Anchor, 2008).  An artist's biographers reveal various unsavory truths.  (Lift Bridge)
• Diane E. Boyd, ed., Everyday Revolutions: Eighteenth-century Women Transforming Public and Private (Delaware, 2008).  Essays on women's work, authorship, the gendered public sphere.  (To be reviewed for Choice)
• Jack B. Rogers and Donald K. McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach, 2nd ed. (Wipf & Stock, 1999).  Revised edition of this controversial study.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• James Simpson, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (Belknap, 2007).  Hermeneutics during the English Reformation.  (Amazon [secondhand])

This Week's Acquisitions

• W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil (Vintage, 2004).  Affair + China = superficial young woman's voyage to self-discovery.  (Barnes & Noble)
• Thomas Vargish, The Providential Aesthetic in Victorian Fiction (U of Virginia Press, 1985).  Theological underpinnings of Victorian narrative theory & practice.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• R. P. Blakeney, Romanism, Tridentine, and Vatican, Refuted: Or No End of Controversy in the Church of Rome.  A Reply to Milner (James Miller, 1873).  Very belated response to John Milner's The End of Religious Controversy (1818).  Blakeney, an indefatigable anti-Catholic controversialist, still has some sway in contemporary fundamentalism.  (eBay)
• Robert Southey, The Book of the Church (J. R. Dunham, 1844).  US reprint of the 5th ed.  (eBay)
• The Christian Treasury, Containing Contributions from Ministers and Members of Various Evangelical Denominations (1847).  A Protestant religious annual.  (eBay)
• Gospel Standard (1861).  Bound volume of a Scottish religious magazine.  (eBay)
• Stephen Prickett, Words and The Word: Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge, 1988).  Interface between Biblical and literary interpretation in 19th-c. Europe.  (Amazon [secondhand])