The Little Professor

This Last Few Weeks' Acquisitions

• Frederika MacDonald, Nathaniel Vaughan: Priest and Man (Asa K. Butts, 1874).  US reprint of novel about an Anglican priest suffering from increasing religious doubt.  
• Mrs. J. Sadlier, trans., Ten Stories from the French of Balleydier (Sadlier, 1866).  Catholic didactic tales for children.
• Marly; or, a Planter's Life in Jamaica, ed. Karina Williamson (Macmillan Caribbean, 2005).  Scholarly edition of an anonymous pro-slavery novel, following the experiences of a young man trying to regain his property.  First published in 1828.
• Varley O'Connor, The Welsh Fasting Girl (Bellevue, 2019).  Historical novel about an American journalist investigating Sarah Jacobs.
• Matthew Plampin, Mrs. Whistler (Borough, 2019).  Historical novel about Maud Franklin during Whistler's lawsuit against John Ruskin.  
• Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf (Riverhead, 2019).  First installment in a fantasy trilogy about a man's quest for a mysterious child, and its repercussions.  
• David Ceri Jones, Boyd Stanley Schlenther, Eryn Mant White, The Elect Methodists: Calvinistic Methodism in England and Wales, 1735-1811 (University of Wales, 2016).  Studies the branch of Methodism associated with George Whitefield and its influence. 
• Todd Webb, Transatlantic Methodists: British Wesleyanism and the Formation of an Evangelical Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ontario and Quebec (McGill-Queen's, 2013).  Complex international (and interpenetrating) relationships between the British and Canadian Methodist churches.
• Mary Hilton, Women and the Shaping of the Nation's Young: Education and Public Doctrine in Britain 1750-1850 (Ashgate, 2007).  How domestic pedagogy in particular was linked to the nation's moral, political, and spiritual health.
• Valerie Grosvenor Myer, Charlotte Bronte: Truculent Spirit (Barnes and Noble, 1987).  Literary study with emphasis on intellectual and religious influences.  
• Joshua King and Winter Jade Werner, eds., Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion: Literary, Historical, and Religious Studies in Dialogue (Ohio, 2019). Expanded papers based on a conference at Baylor in 2015.  (I'm in here.)
• Allan Hepburn, ed., Troubled Legacies: Narrative and Inheritance (Toronto, 2007).  Essays analyzing the inheritance trope in relationship to religion, the Gothic, national identity, gender, etc.  
• Sarah Graham, ed., A History of the Bildungsroman (Cambridge, 2019).  Essay collection covering the bildungsroman from its beginnings to the present.  (I'm reviewing this for Choice.)

This Month's Acquisitions

(Some books appeared while I was on the other side of the country.)

• M. H., From Cottage to Castle; Or, Faithful in Little.  A Tale Founded on Fact (Nimmo, 1883).  The experiences of a young Scottish girl and her sister as they face various trials in the wake of their parents' deaths.  (eBay)
• Florence E. Burch, Led by a Little Child, or the Blind Basket-Maker (RTS, n.d.).  A little girl helps restore the faith of a man who lost his eyesight during a lightning strike.  (eBay)
• Christine Alexander, ed., An Edition of the Early Writings of Charlotte Bronte, Volume II: The Rise of Angria, 1833-1835; Part 2: 1834-1835 (Basil Blackwell, 1991).  Collection of Angria tales beginning with High Life in Verdopolis.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Ottessa Moshfegh, McGlue: A Novella (Penguin, 2014).  In the mid-nineteenth century, a man wakes up and tries to remember if he just killed someone.  (Lift Bridge)
• Bryan Furuness, ed., My Name was Never Frankenstein: And Other Classic Adventure Tales Remixed (Indiana, 2019).  Anthology of mashed-up and otherwise revised stories featuring famous literary characters.  (Lift Bridge)
• Amber K. Regis and Deborah Wynne, eds., Charlotte Bronte: Legacies and Afterlives (Manchester, 2017).  Ways in which both Bronte's life and her fiction have been dramatized, idolized, and reworked.  (Amazon)
• Ian Haywood, Romanticism and Caricature (Cambridge, 2013).  Analyzes a series of specific caricatures by Cruikshank, Gillray, Heath and Grant, and Rowlandson, looking at their implications for thinking about political debate in the early nineteenth century.  (Amazon)
• Jessica Fay, Wordsworth's Monastic Inheritance: Poetry, Place, and the Sense of Community (Oxford, 2018).  Examines the importance of monastic ruins, Spenserian aesthetics, the pastoral, etc. for Wordsworth's representations of local community.  (Amazon)
• Alison Milbank, God & the Gothic: Religion, Romance, and Reality in the English Literary Tradition (Oxford, 2018).  Argues that the Gothic is deeply rooted in post-Reformation theological questions.  (Amazon)
• Tim Allender, Learning Femininity in Colonial India, 1820-1932 (Manchester, 2016).  Examines how ideas about gender altered in different contexts across India, including in education, missionary work, medicine, etc. (Amazon)
• Christopher Wakeling, Chapels of England: Buildings of Protestant Nonconformity (Historic England, 2017).  An architectural history of Nonconformist chapels between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries.  (Amazon)
• Ethan Shagan, The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Princeton, 2018).  A history of what it meant to "believe," including the new crisis of defining belief post-Reformation.  (Amazon)
• Susan O'Brien, Leaving God for God: The Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul in Britain, 1847-2017 (Longman, 2017).  The history of a religious community, both in and of itself and as a way of thinking about Catholic history more generally.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Ruth Compton Brouwer, New Women for God: Canadian Presbyterian Women and India Missions, 1876-1914 (Toronto, 1990).  Studies how missionary work intersected with questions of early feminism and imperial politics.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• David Fitzpatrick, Descendancy: Irish Protestant Histories since 1795 (Cambridge, 2014). Studies Protestant narratives about their sense of growing marginality, focusing on the role of the Orange Order.  (Amazon)
• Diane Langmore, Missionary Lives: Papua, 1874-1914 (Hawaii, 1989).  The personal experiences of missionaries to Papua, New Guinea (both Catholic and Protestant), including their relationships with indigenous people, domestic lives, educations, and so forth.  (Amazon [secondhand])

 

This Last Three Weeks' Acquisitions

• Margaret Oliphant, Caleb Field: A Tale of the Puritans (Harper and Brothers, 1851).  Historical novel about the persecution of the Puritans, set around the time of the Great Plague.  (eBay)
• Meir Goldschmidt, Jacob Bendixen, the Jew, trans. and adapt. Mary Howitt, 3 vols. (Colburn, 1851).  A young Jewish man tries to construct an identity for himself, with little success.  First published in 1845.  (eBay)
• Elizabeth Sandham, Providential Care: A Tale, Founded on Facts (Harvey and Darton, 1825).  Two poor children find help and live happily ever after.  (eBay)
• Sylvain Marechal, The Woman Priest, trans. Sheila Delany (University of Alberta, 2016).  Translation of Marechal's 1801 novella about a young woman who decides that the best way to join the priest she loves is to become one herself.  (Amazon)
• Gerald Murnane, Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murname (FSG, 2018).  Short stories by the Australian novelist.  (Lift Bridge)
• Laurie R. King and Leslie Klinger, eds., For the Sake of the Game: Stories Inspired by the Sherlock Holmes Canon (Pegasus, 2018).  Includes both straight Holmes pastiches and more loose responses (including Holmes and Watson as...insects).  (Amazon)
• Jonathan Dent, Sinister Histories: Gothic Novels and Representations of the Past, from Horace Walpole to Mary Wollstonecraft (Manchester, 2016).  Argues that eighteenth-century Gothic fiction transformed contemporary historiography in its construction of terrifying pasts.  (Amazon)
• Justin A. Sider, Parting Words: Victorian Poetry and Public Address (Virginia, 2018).  Analyzes the valedictory mode in Victorian poetry.  I'm reviewing this for Choice.  (Review copy)
• Colin Jager, Unquiet Things: Secularism in the Romantic Age (Penn, 2015).  Emergence of different forms of "the secular" in the early nineteenth century.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Jonathan Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford, 2005).  Studies the literary-political implications of the expanding notion of "enthusiasm" during the early nineteenth century (religious, radical, etc.).  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Sebastian Lecourt, Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, & the Secular Imagination (Oxford, 2018).  Analyzes the Victorian racialization of religious identity (e.g., Eliot, Arnold).  (Amazon)
• David Young, F. D. Maurice and Unitarianism (Clarendon, 1992).  Examines the influence of Unitarian thinking on the Broad Church theologian F. D. Maurice.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters, Volume III: The Crisis and Conscience of Nonconformity (Oxford, 2015). Conclusion of Watts' trilogy about the history of Nonconformist belief in Britain, focusing this time on its transformations during the Victorian period.  (Amazon)

This Last Two Weeks' Acquisitions

• Barbara Hofland, The Blind Farmer and His Children, 3rd ed. (Harris and Son, 1823).  A tenant farmer with cataracts experiences various hardships brought on by the inexperienced new landowner.  (eBay)
• ---, Alicia and Her Aunt; Or, Think Before You Speak (Nelson, n.d.).  The effects of bad behavior on one's siblings, among other things.  (eBay)
• Samantha Harvey, The Western Wind (Grove, 2018).  A priest in 15th-century England tries to solve the problem of a man's mysterious death.  (Amazon)
• Rowan Strong, Victorian Christianity & Emigrant Voyages to British Colonies, c. 1840-1914 (Oxford, 2017).  Preaching to emigrants, onboard religious practices, religion and various social classes/denominations, etc.  (Amazon)
• Kathryn Gleadle, The Early Feminists: Radical Unitarians and the Emerence of the Women's Rights Movement, 1831-51 (St. Martin's, 1995).  Suffrage, marriage rights, other aspects of feminist activism.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Helen Boyles, Romanticism and Methodism: The Problem of Religious Enthusiasm (Routledge, 2017).  Analyzes the ongoing anxieties about extreme emotional and spiritual experience in both theology and Romantic poetry.  (Amazon [secondhand])

This Last Two Weeks' Acquisitions

• C. A. Jones, adapt., Only a Girl: The Story of a Quiet Life.  A Tale of Brittany (Wells Gardner, Darton & Co., c. 1894).  A young orphan girl forced into a life of servitude eventually receives a reward, of a sort.  (eBay)
• Emile Erckmann and Louis Alexandre Chatrian, The Invisible Eye: Tales of Terror by Erckmann-Chatrian, ed. Hugh Lamb (Collins, 2018).  Anthologizes the horror stories by this once-famous writing team, now usually remembered as historical novelists.  (Amazon)
• Ian Wedde, Symmes Hole (Penguin, 1987).  Parallel-plot historical novel set in 1820s and 1980s New Zealand, featuring two men in search of their own identity.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Emma Mason, Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith (Oxford, 2018).  Spiritual biography analyzing Rossetti's work in the light of ecotheology.  I'm reviewing this for the Journal of Religion and the Arts.  (Review copy)
• Timothy Larsen, George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles: Incarnation, Doubt and Reenchantment (IVP, 2018).  Reprints Larsen's Hansen Lectures on MacDonald's fiction as an attempt to "counteract skepticism and to herald instead the reality of the miraculous," along with the various responses to the lectures.  (Free copy)
• Jackie C. Horne, History and the Construction of the Child in Early British Children's Literature (Ashgate, 2011).  Historical fiction, representations of children in history, writing history for children, etc.  (Amazon)
• Andrew King, The London Journal, 1845-83: Periodicals, Production and Gender (Ashgate, 2004).  Uses the London Journal as a case study in periodical writing, reading, and publishing during the Victorian period.  (Amazon)
• Rebecca Davies, Written Maternal Authority and Eighteenth-Century Education in Britain: Educating by the Book (Ashgate, 2014).  Analyzes different ways of representing the mother as teacher within the home (and their wider implications for women's writing) from Richardson to Austen.  (Amazon)
• Jean Fernandez, Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy (Routledge, 2010).  Representations of servants, story-telling, and reading in both fiction and autobiography.  (Amazon)

This Last Two Weeks' Acquisitions

• Thea Astley, A Kindness Cup (Penguin, 1989).  Reprint of Astley's 1974 historical novel about a late-Victorian Australian town called to face the facts of how it was founded.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Kate Atkinson, Transcription (Little Brown, 2018).  Atkinson (un)does Le Carre's spy thrillers, with a lowly secretary-turned-spy as the protagonist.  (Amazon)
• JoEllen DeLucia, A Feminine Enlightenment: British Women Writers and the Philosophy of Progress, 1759-1820 (Edinburgh, 2015).  The legacy of Scottish Enlightenment thinking for women poets, novelists, and philosophers.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Tamara S. Wagner, ed., Charlotte Yonge: Rereading Domestic Religious Fiction (Routledge, 2012).  Analyzes Yonge's practice of and influence on nineteenth-century religious fiction, including its commercial aspects.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Andrew Smith, Gothic Death, 1740-1914: A Literary History (Manchester, 2018).  The hows and whys of death in the Gothic, both in narrative form and cultural resonance (e.g., religious implications).  (Amazon)
• Robert M. Ryan, Charles Darwin and the Church of Wordsworth (Oxford, 2016).  The influence of Wordsworthian nature on Darwin's work and, contrariwise, how Darwin's work later produced rereadings of Wordsworthian nature.  (Amazon)

This Week's Acquisitions

• Esi Edugyan, Washington Black (Knopf, 2018).  A young slave in Barbados is forced to go on the run and winds up voyaging across the globe.  (Amazon)
• Oliver P. Rafferty, The Catholic Church and the Protestant State: Nineteenth-Century Irish Realities (Four Courts, 2008).  As the title suggests, mostly essays on the intersections between the church hierarchy and Anglo-Irish politics and politicians (including Disraeli and Gladstone).  (Amazon)
• Michael P. Carroll, Irish Pilgrimage: Holy Wells and Popular Catholic Devotion (Johns Hopkins, 1999).  Argues that holy wells emerged as central only in the post-Reformation period, with a focus on early nineteenth-century practice.  (Amazon)
• Donald Akenson, Exporting the Rapture: John Nelson Darby and the Victorian Conquest of North American Evangelicalism (Oxford, 2018).  How Darby and the Plymouth Brethren wound up exerting an unexpectedly outsized influence on American religious culture.  (Amazon)

This Last Two Weeks' Acquisitions

(Still picking up volumes of the Novels of Faith and Doubt series.)

• Frederick Robinson, Church and Chapel (Garland, 1975).  Reprint of Robinson's 1863 triple-decker about religious, political, and romantic conflicts between the C of E and Dissenters, as embodied in the conflict between two clergymen.  (eBay)
• ---, High Church (Garland, 1975).  A marriage founders after a young woman confesses to her clergyman.  (eBay)
• Frederick R. Smith, The Minder and The Coming of the Preachers (Garland, 1975).  Romantic machinations against the background of attempts to develop a clerical career, and a historical novel about the emergence of Methodism.  (eBay)
• Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls (Doubleday, 2018).  The Iliad retold primarily from the point of view of the women, especially Briseis and Helen.  (Amazon)
• M. Allen Cunningham, Perpetua's Kin (Atelier26, 2018).  Rewrite of Hamlet taking place in over a century of American history.  (Lift Bridge)
• Jean Amery, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor, trans. Adrian Nathan West (NYRB, 2018).  New translation of Amery's 1978 novel that rehabilitates Flaubert's famous "bungler."  (Amazon)
• The Month, vol. 91 (1898).  A bound volume of the Catholic periodical.  (eBay)
• Michael A. Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558-1829 (Macmillan, 1998).  What the title says--a social history of Catholicism between the Reformation and Catholic Emancipation.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Helen May, Baljit Kaur, and Larry Prochner, Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods: Nineteenth-Century Missionary Infant Schools in Three British Colonies (Ashgate, 2014).  Comparative study of the religious and political goals of schools for children in India, Canada, and New Zealand.  (Amazon)
• Cassandra L. Yacovazzi, Escaped Nuns: True Womanhood and the Campaign against Convents in Antebellum America (Oxford, 2018).  New study of the anti-convent panic primarily associated with Maria Monk.  (Amazon)

 

This Week's Acquisitions

• [Grace Kennedy], Father Clement: A Roman Catholic Story (William Oliphant, 1823).  After thinking about this novel for many years, I finally managed to run down a first edition for my own collection.  (eBay)
• Leonard de Vries, ed., Flowers of Delight: An Agreeable Garland of Prose and Poetry, 1765-1830 (Pantheon, 1965).  An anthology of classic children's tales and tracts, ranging from grammar books to abolitionist poems.  (Old Editions)
• Marilyn Pemberton, ed., Enchanted Ideologies: A Collection of Nineteenth-Century Moral Fairy Tales (True Bill, 2010).  Collection of stories from mostly later Victorian periodicals.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Dance on the Volcano, trans. Kaiama L. Glover (Archipelago, 2016).  Translation of Vieux-Chauvet's 1957 novel about a Haitian singer's growing radicalism on the eve of the Haitian Revolution in 1791.  (Talking Leaves)
• Barbara Hanrahan, The Albatross Muff (Women's Press, 1978).  An ex-convict returns to England with her young charge, with somewhat worrisome results.  (Amazon [secondhand])  
• M. O. Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge, 2001).  How writers like Amelia Opie, George Walker, Jane West, &c. attempted to combat radical politics via fiction.  (Amazon)
• Olive Brose, Frederick Denison Maurice: Rebellious Conformist 1805-1872 (Ohio, 1971).  Intellectual biography of the key Victorian theologian and moralist.  (Old Editions)
• Albion M. Urdank, Birth, Death, and Religious Faith in an English Dissenting Community: A Microhistory of Nailsworth and Hinterland, 1695-1837 (Lexington, 2016).  A demographic study of how reproduction and Christianity intersected.  (Amazon)

This (Last Two) Weeks' Acquisitions

(My previous desktop went kaput; now back to posting after finally going over to the Mac side.)

• Christopher Hope, Kruger's Alp (Viking, 1985).  South African political satire based on The Pilgrim's Progress. (Amazon [secondhand])
• Rebecca Fraser, Charlotte Bronte (Methuen, 1988).  Biography of CB.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Edward E. Andrews, Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World (Harvard, 2013).  Examines the work of Native American, African-American, and Afro-Caribbean evangelicals from the early modern period into the nineteenth century, including their often critical relationship to the Protestant establishment.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Peter Y. Choi, George Whitefield: Evangelist for God and Empire (Eerdmans, 2018).  New biography of the influential Methodist that examines the connections between his evangelism and his politics, particularly his roles in shaping American imperialism and slavery.  (Amazon)
• Esme Cleall, Missionary Discourses of Difference: Negotiating Otherness in the British Empire, 1840-1900 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).  A study of missionary prose that focuses on how far they were able to extend their belief in Christian "universalism" to their encounters with indigenous peoples.  (Amazon [secondhand])