The Little Professor

This Week's Acquisitions

• Fannie E. Newberry, The Wrestler of Philippi: A Tale of the Early Christians (David G. Cook, 1896).  A late-19th c. paperback (w/color covers) of this early church tale by an American novelist who began publishing fiction in middle age.  (eBay)
• Stephen Woulfe, A Letter to a Protestant; or, the Balance of Evils: Being a Companion of the Probable Consequences of Emancipating the Catholics of Ireland... (Richard Coyne, 1825).  Critique of arguments against emancipation from an Irish POV.  A bit about Woulfe here.  (eBay)
• E. C. Kemp, The Refutation of Nonconformity on Its Own Professed Principle... (W. F. Grant, 1837).  Argues that the Scriptures support episcopacy.  (eBay)

This Week's Acquisitions

• Kate Mitchell and Nicola Parsons, eds., Reading Historical Fiction: The Revenant and Remembered Past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).  Collection of essays on historical fiction from its origins to the present, including chapters on Gothic, neo-Victorianism, general theory, etc.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• William Palmer, Two of Eight Letters to N. Wiseman, D.D., on the Errors of Romanism (King & Baird, 1851).  US reprint of part of Palmer's controversial tracts on the usual Catholic targets (here, with heavy emphasis on idolatry).  Palmer, of Worcester College, Oxford, was a lapsed Tractarian; somewhat confusingly, his contemporary is William Palmer of Magdalene College, Oxford, also a Tractarian (and, late in life, a convert to Catholicism).    (eBay)

This Week's Acquisitions

• David Nirnberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (Norton, 2013).  History of anti-Jewish thought from antiquity to the modern world.  The title distinguishes Nirnberg's subject from what he classes as the strictly modern concept of antisemitism, which emerged in the 19th c.; he is studying "a category, a set of ideas and attributes with which non-Jews can make sense of and criticize their world" (3). 

This Week's Acquisitions

• The Chapel of the Angels, and Other Tales (Catholic Publication Society, 1873).  A collection of Catholic tales, including the titular novella (about a church robbing and its aftermath), two short stories, and two poems.  (eBay)
• Stephen Gallagher, The Bedlam Detective (Broadway, 2012).  Neo-Victorian mystery/horror involving strange animals and moors (shades of The Hound of the Baskervilles?).  (Lift Bridge)
• Victoria Nelson, Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural (Harvard, 2012).  Examines 21st-century Gothic as a revisionist and, indeed, possibly religious phenomenon.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Stephen Prickett, Modernity and the Reinvention of Tradition: Backing into the Future (Cambridge, 2009).  Study of that rather weighted term "tradition" in an international and interdisciplinary context.  (Amazon)
• Alfred Moritz Myers and F. L. Mortimer, The Young Jew: A History of Alfred Moritz Myers, Adapted for Children (American Sunday-School Union, 1848).  A kiddified version of Myers' conversion narrative Both One in Christ (1838).  (eBay)
• S. Karly Kehoe, Creating a Scottish Church: Catholicism, Gender, and Ethnicity in Nineteenth-Century Scotland (Manchester, 2010).  How the Catholic Church strengthened its position in a decidedly hostile national context.  (Amazon)
• Julia Markus, J. Anthony Froude: The Last Undiscovered Great Victorian (Scribner, 2005).  Biography of the historian, essayist, and controversialist; there's another biography scheduled for this year, incidentally, so perhaps Froude is being (re)discovered after all.  (Amazon [secondhand]) 

This Week's Acquisitions

• M. E. Francis, The Duenna of a Genius (Little, Brown, 1898).  A woman tries to deal with her younger sister, a brilliant violinist, while putting her own life on hold.  (eBay)
• Yoko Ogawa, Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales, trans. Stephen Snyder (Picador, 2013).  First English appearance of this 1998 collection of dark psychological tales.  (Lift Bridge)
• Thomas Maltman, Little Wolves (Soho, 2012).  Two very different members of a Minnesota farming community seek to understand crises touching their lives.  (BOMC)
• Frederick William Faber, Hymns, 4th ed. (Burns and Oates, 1861).  Important collection of hymns by Faber, a leading Catholic convert and Oratorian not always exactly on the best of terms with John Henry Newman.  (eBay)
• Martha Nussbaum and Alison L. LaCroix, eds., Subversion and Sympathy: Gender, Law, and the British Novel (Oxford, 2013).   Interdisciplinary collection of essays on topics such as marriage, illegitimacy, testimony, etc.  I'm reviewing this for Choice.  (Review copy)
• Marvin R. O'Connell, Critics on Trial: An Introduction to the Catholic Modernist Crisis (CUA, 1994).  A history of the international trials and travails of late-19th and early-20th c. attempts to bring Catholic teachings into line with new trends in Biblical scholarship and other fields.  (Amazon [secondhand])

This Week's Month's Acquisitions

• Rachel McCrindell, The English Governess: A Tale of Real Life (Herman Hooker, 1844).  Important early "governess novel" about the trials and tribulations of this job.  First American ed.  (eBay)
• Edward Everett Hale, Margaret Percival in America: A Tale (Phillips, Sampson, & Co., 1850).  Unitarian response to Elizabeth Missing Sewell's Tractarian novel, Margaret Percival.  (eBay)
• The Two Sufferers Contrasted; Or, Fear and Anguish and Joy and Peace.  A Record of Facts from the Chamber of Sickness and Death (American Sunday-School Union, 1849).  Religious tract about--you guessed it--how religion affects the ways in which the ill and dying respond to their imminent demise.  (eBay)
• Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers (Europa, 2012).  Reprint of Burgess' 1980 novel about the yoked fortunes of a commercially-successful gay novelist and...a Pope...during the twentieth century.  (Barnes & Noble)
• Hannah Adams, A Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Denominations (James Eastburn, 1817).  Fourth edition of Adams' significant reference work, first published in 1784 as A View of Religious Opinions.  (eBay)
• Child's Companion and Juvenile Instructor (1862).  One volume of this Religious Tract Society periodical.  (eBay)
• Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton, 2001).  Analyzes how British and Indian religious and intellectual traditions mutually influenced each other during the Victorian period.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Paul S. Ell and K. D. M. Snell, Rival Jerusalems: The Geography of Victorian Religion (Cambridge, 2009).  Who was worshipping how where and when.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Nigel Yates, Liturgical Space: Christian Wordship and Church Buildings in Europe 1500-2000 (Ashgate, 2008).  Examines relationship between liturgical and architectural traditions (and innovations).  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Emmet Larkin, The Making of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, 1850-1860 (North Carolina, 1980).  One volume in Larkin's standard history of developments in nineteenth-century Irish Catholicism.  (Amazon [secondhand])

This Week's Acquisitions

(The Huntington Library always has a discount book cart lurking in its publishing offices.  But they often seem a little startled when someone shows up to buy something...)

• Alison Conway, The Protestant Whore: Courtesan Narrative and Religious Controversy in England, 1680-1750 (Toronto, 2010).  Examines the political, religious, and sexual ramifications of writing about real and fictional courtesans like Nell Gwynn. 
• Ashok Malhotra, Making British Indian Fictions 1772-1823 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).  Historical transformations in writing about, consuming, and colonizing India. 
• Peter Clarke and Charlotte Methuen, eds., The Church and Literature (Boydell & Brewer, 2012).  The Ecclesiastical Historical Society proceedings, featuring essays on everyone from Gregory the Great to Lady Georgiana Fullerton to Rose Macaulay. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, trans. Alison Anderson (Europa, 2008).  The fates of a concierge and a young girl undergo an unexpected turn.  (Dollar Books)

This Week's Acquisitions

• Robert Wilson Evans, Tales of the Ancient British Church (Joseph Masters, 1841).  Second edition of this collection of short stories/novellas set during the early Middle Ages.  (eBay)
• John Banville, Ancient Light (Knopf, 2012).  An aging actor reminisces about life and lost loves as he works on a new project.  (Barnes & Noble)

This Week's (Belated) Acquisitions

• Robert Wilson Evans, The Rectory of Valehead (Smith, Elder, 1832).  Popular early Victorian didactic novel detailing how to develop and maintain an authentically "Christian" household; remained in print into the 1850s.  (eBay)
• Rachel Carroll, ed., Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities (Continuum, 2009).  Collection devoted to theoretical problems in all sorts of adaptations (to stage, to film, to TV...).  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Linda Hutcheon with Siobhan O'Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2012).  Revised edition of one of the more important theoretical accounts of adaptation.  (Desk copy)
• Michael Slater, The Great Charles Dickens Scandal (Yale, 2012).  The hullabaloo surrounding Dickens' relationship with Ellen Ternan.  (Amazon [secondhand])