Cambridge UP Research Articles

Reviews

Celia Easton reviews Sir Charles Grandison, Edited by Lesley Peterson and Sylvia Hunt, assisted by Catherine Jones, Laurel Charron, Stephanie Leblanc, Laurie Morin, Ann Vanderaa, and Katarina Valentic. Illustrated by Juliet McMaster. Juvenilia Press, 2022. John Plotz reviews Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Fictional Experience by Timothy Gao. Cambridge UP, 2021.

‶Don’t Say Neigh, Say Yay”

‶Don’t Say Neigh, Say Yay”

Sylvian Fachard, Edward M. Harris (eds.): The Destruction of Cities in the Ancient Greek World. Integrating the Archaeological and Literary Evidence. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2021.

Sylvian Fachard, Edward M. Harris (eds.): The Destruction of Cities in the Ancient Greek World. Integrating the Archaeological and Literary Evidence. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2021.

Jane Heath: Clement of Alexandria and the Shaping of Christian Literary Practice. Miscellany and the Transformation of Greco-Roman Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2020.

Jane Heath: Clement of Alexandria and the Shaping of Christian Literary Practice. Miscellany and the Transformation of Greco-Roman Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2020.

John T. Lowney (1957–2022)

This past September admired friend and respected scholar, John T. Lowney, passed away at the age of 65. John was professor of English at St John’s University in Queens, New York.John’s work explored the cultural politics of how modernism has been constructed in the literary history of the United States. His first book, The American Avant-Garde Tradition: William Carlos Williams, Postmodern Poetry, and the Politics of Cultural Memory (Bucknell UP, 1997), focused on Williams as an avant-garde writer in the early modernist period during and after World War 1 and elaborated the complex literary and cultural politics of Williams’s reception as a poet through the late 1950s and 1960s. His scholarship on twentieth-century American poetry and literary culture continued in History, Memory, and the Literary Left: Modern American Poetry, 1935–1968 (U of Iowa P, 2006).Over the years, his writing on Williams included other essays and reviews—including, most recently, “Williams: The New Poetries and Legacy” in The Cambridge Companion to William Carlos Williams (Cambridge UP, 2016) and “Reflections on Bryce Conrad’s Historiography” in the William Carlos Williams Review (2018). In addition, John’s scholarship in African American literary and cultural studies, and jazz literature, includes Jazz Internationalism: Literary Afro-Modernism and the Cultural Politics of Black Music (U of Illinois P, 2017) as well as essays in American Literature, The Langston Hughes Review, Melus, and The African American Review. His intellectual work was recognized with grants from the Donald C. Gallup Fellowship in American Literature at Yale’s Beinecke Library and a National Endowment for the Humanities Study Grant.During our PhD studies, writing about Williams, we both read John’s work. We also remember John as approachable and engaging, quietly spoken and sharply intelligent, with a sense of humor amid the often overly serious atmosphere of academic conference. Moreover, he was a generous and sensitive reviewer, including a review of Ian’s first book that came out of the PhD studies his own work had helped along. We celebrate his contributions as we mourn the loss of a colleague and friend. Though we are confident that John’s voice will continue to inspire continuing explorations of Williams’s ongoing presence in the tradition of American poetry and poetics.

The Dickens Checklist

The Dickens Checklist Dominic Rainsford The Dickens Checklist, recording new publications, doctoral dissertations, and online ressources of significance for Dickens studies, appears in each issue of the journal. A cumulative cross-referenced edition of the Checklist, consisting of listings since vol. 37, no. 1 (March 2020), is available at dickenssociety.org, and is updated once a year. _______ Secondary Sources: Biography and Criticism Celeste, Mark. “Visualizing Mutuality: Teaching / Networks in Our Mutual Friend.” Victorians Institute Journal, vol. 49, 2022, pp. 166–97. Chelebourg, Christian. “Scrooge en famille: lecture socialisée d’un rite fictionnel.” Noël entre magie blanche et magie noire, edited by Christian Chelebourg, Lettres Modernes Minard, 2022, pp. 121–37. Revue des lettres modernes: Écritures jeunesse: 4. [CC ] Dick, Archie. Reading Spaces in South Africa, 1850–1920s. Cambridge UP, 2020. Elements in Publishing and Book Culture. [Ch. 3: “Dickens on the Page, the Podium, and the Stage”] Dickens Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 1, Mar. 2023. [Dominic Rainsford, “From the Editor,” pp. 5–7; Benjamin O’Dell, “David Copperfield, Émile, and the Legacy of Enlightenment Education Literature,” pp. 8–27; James Armstrong, “‘In a Dark Wig’: Reinventing Byron as Steerforth in David Copperfield,” pp. 28–44; Kathryne Ford, “Dickensian Divisions: David Copperfield’s ‘Hero[ine] of my own life,’” pp. 45–63; Lanya Lamouria, “Charles Dickens, Charles Babbage, Richard Babley: Material Memory in David Copperfield,” pp. 64–82; Jeremy Parrott, “Electrical Undercurrents in David Copperfield,” pp. 83–107; Robert Sirabian, review of The Lawyer in Dickens, by Franziska Quabeck, pp. 108–12; Michelle Allen-Emerson, review of Bite the Hand that Reads: Dickens, Animals, and Sanitary Reform, by Terry Scarborough, pp. 112–16; Tamara S. Wagner, review of The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950, by Luke Lewin Davies, and Vagrancy in the Victorian Age: Representing the Wandering Poor in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, by Alistair Robinson, pp. 116–21; Dominic Rainsford, “The Dickens Checklist,” pp. 127–30] Dickens Studies Annual, vol. 54, no. 1, 2023. [Introduction, pp. v–vii; James Armstrong, “Rejecting ‘Nature’ in Martin Chuzzlewit: Racism, Slavery, and Death in Eden,” pp. 1–13; Jane E. Kim, “Watching the Detectives: The Reciprocal Gaze in Our Mutual Friend,” pp. 14–34; Laura White, “Insects, Age, and Failure: The Suppressed Chapter of ‘The Wasp in a Wig,’” pp. 35–50; James Hamby, “‘Let us veil our meaning’: Holiday Romance and the Second Reform Act of 1867,” pp. 51–73; Melissa Jenkins, “Whither, Hardy?: Selected Hardy Studies 2010–2022,” pp. 74–83; Richard A. Kaye, “Twenty-First-Century Oscar Wilde: A Review Essay,” pp. 84–119.] The Dickensian, vol. 118, part 3, no. 516, Winter 2022. [Catherine Waters, “From the New President,” pp. 253–56; William F. Long, “Dickens, Ainsworth and Turpin’s Gyves,” pp. 258–68; Renata Goroshkova, “A Tale of Two Magazines: Dickens on the Pages of Contemporary and Fatherland Notes,” pp. 269–80; Abderrezzaq Ghafsi, “Emir Abdelkader in Charles Dickens’s Journals,” pp. 281–90; Robert C. Hanna, “Joseph M. Field, International Copyright, and a Masque for Boz,” pp. 291–308; Don Richard Cox, “The Charles Collins Letter: Some Additional Mysteries,” pp. 309–18; Brian Ruck, “Illegitimacy in Dickens, and the Riddle of Ellen Ternan,” pp. 319–32; Iain Crawford, review of Dickens and Democracy in the Age of Paper: Representing the People, by Carolyn Vellenga Berman, pp. 334–37; Helena Kelly, review of Down from London: Seaside Reading in the Railway Age, by Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton, pp. 337–39; Francesca Orestano, review of A Sweet View: The Making of an English Idyll, by Malcolm Andrews, pp. 339–42; Boze Herrington, review of England in the Age of Dickens: 1812–1870, by Jeremy Black, pp. 343–44; Sydney Wren, review of Dickens and Staplehurst: A Biography of a Rail Crash, by Gerald Dickens, pp. 345–47; Lucy Whitehead, review of This Much Is True, by Miriam Margolyes, pp. 347–49; Maria Juko, review of Dear Mr. Dickens, by Nancy Churnin and Bethany Stancliffe, pp. 349–51; Philipp Röttgers, review of A Christmas Carol (music album), by Majestica, pp. 352–53; Paul Graham, review of Frederic Kitton and St Albans: From Pickwick to Preservation (exhibition), pp. 354–55; “Fellowship Notes and News...

Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France by Anne Linton

Reviewed by: Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France by Anne Linton Céline Brossillon Linton, Anne. Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge UP, 2022. ISBN 978-1-316-51182-4. Pp. 250. Anne Linton's book offers an important contribution to the history of sexuality by discussing intersex people, "individuals whose bodies, or senses of self, challenged binary sex" (2), otherwise known as "hermaphrodites" in the nineteenth century, in medical archives (first part of the book) and literature, both high and low (second half of the book). The archival research Linton has undertaken is massive, bringing to light over 200 newly uncovered case studies of gender ambiguous people from 1800 to 1920. She also analyzes how long-forgotten popular fiction influenced several well-known texts, allowing Linton to propose fresh readings of famous authors like Balzac, Gautier, and Zola. Unmaking Sex is the first book to explore why "hermaphrodism" was a central theme in nineteenth-century medicine and literature, and to discuss the social anxieties around those "gender outlaws" (2). Because of the Napoleonic Code (1804) which required the sex of the baby to be recorded on the birth certificate within three days of birth, Linton claims that many scholars have assumed that the nineteenth-century French had a very rigid binary vision of its individuals, but she shows that some doctors and authors actually challenged the concept of "True Sex" (the one-body-one-sex rule) as they realized that some individuals fell outside of this binary. Linton believes the literature supports the claim made by some doctors that the observation of the external body might not tell the whole story about someone. Some therefore advocated for adding a "neuter sex," "doubtful sex," or "third sex" category to article 57 of the civil code to better acknowledge the variation of bodies. Even though Balzac, Gautier, and Zola seem forward-thinking, she warns us not to "assign too revolutionary and subversive a status to our novelists" as they "also announce that non-normative identities have no place in nineteenth-century France" (134). A growing medical discourse connecting external signs of "doubtful sex" with mental deficiencies throughout the nineteenth century allows Linton to establish a link between the discourses around intersex and Zola's theory of degeneration, a connection which had been overlooked in scholarship. "Hermaphrodism" was sometimes therefore perceived as the result of "degenerate heredity," linking "doubtful sex" and teratology, and "hermaphrodism" with homosexuality. Throughout her book and then more specifically at the end, Linton draws parallels between those nineteenth-century sources and contemporary concerns and debates around intersex individuals in the United States. She discusses how medical protocols to assign gender at birth have been met with growing resistance and criticism since early sex assignment surgeries and treatments are considered damaging to the child. Mental health rather than sex assignment, and a more patient-centered medicine, are the path forward. Since France is the focus of the book, addressing the state of the debate around intersex [End Page 195] individuals from a medical, legal, and literary standpoint in France would have been a nice way to loop the loop, even though the discussion of the case of the United States is also invaluable. [End Page 196] Céline Brossillon Ursinus College (PA) Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

Interview of Prof. Sourav Mukherjee, Professor of Organisation Behaviour and Dean, Alumni Relations IIMB and author of “Inclusive Business Models” (Cambridge UP, 2021) by Prof. Mousumi Padhi, XIM University and Prof. Gopal P. Mahapatra, IIMB

Interview of Prof. Sourav Mukherjee, Professor of Organisation Behaviour and Dean, Alumni Relations IIMB and author of “Inclusive Business Models” (Cambridge UP, 2021) by Prof. Mousumi Padhi, XIM University and Prof. Gopal P. Mahapatra, IIMB

The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950 by Luke Lewin Davies, and: Vagrancy in the Victorian Age: Representing the Wandering Poor in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture by Alistair Robinson

Reviewed by: The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950 by Luke Lewin Davies, and: Vagrancy in the Victorian Age: Representing the Wandering Poor in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture by Alistair Robinson Tamara S. Wagner (bio) Luke Lewin Davies. The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Pp. xvi + 344. ISBN 978-3-030-73432-9. link. springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-73432-9 (open access). Alistair Robinson. Vagrancy in the Victorian Age: Representing the Wandering Poor in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Cambridge UP, 2021. Pp. xi + 254. £75.00. ISBN 978-1-316-51985-1 (hb). The most memorable representations of homelessness in Dickens's writing have chiefly been discussed as a central part of his social criticism. Poor Jo, the crossing-sweeper in Bleak House, after all, became a powerful icon in fund-raising campaigns at the time, reinforced by O. G. Rejlander's photographic interpretation of Dickens's character in Poor Jo (also known as Night in Town [ca. 1860]). However, Dickens's depictions of vagrancy range from the comical scene in which Mr. Pickwick is mistaken for a tramp when he falls asleep in a wheelbarrow, and consequently is carted away, to the escape that the former childminder Betty Higden makes in Our Mutual Friend by choosing itinerant trading over the workhouse. In his fullscale discussion of tramps in British literature, Luke Davies provocatively suggests that Higden therefore partially "fits the tramp conception of homelessness" as a viable option (251), foreshadowing aspects of what he terms "reverse discourse tramp fiction." Recent studies, in fact, have come to explore the divergent aspects of homelessness in Dickens's writing. His many, vastly different, vagrant characters, these studies show, may [End Page 116] productively be read through different lenses apart from the more familiar social issues of urban poverty, industrialization, or the condemnation of a "telescopic philanthropy" that refuses to see anything closer than exotic objects filtered precisely through a medium of distance. Luke Lewin Davies's The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950 and Alistair Robinson's Vagrancy in the Victorian Age: Representing the Wandering Poor in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture instead provide detailed insight into Victorian perceptions of various forms of vagrancy. Their discussions reframe our perceptions of Dickens's wide-ranging, divergently represented characters, with their often very different experiences of and reasons for homelessness. Davies's The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950 offers an immensely detailed account of the tramp in literary texts that span more than a century, with a focus on the late-Victorian age. Davies's main argument is based on the concept of the tramp as a cultural construct, which he suggests emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, and remained so until the mid-twentieth. Whereas in pre-industrial times vagabonds were associated with and could, in popular culture, be celebrated for their independence, in the wake of industrialization, the identity of this figure became reframed according to productivity versus inutility. Davies takes up the figure of the tramp to reconsider discourses on work in the nineteenth- and early twenty-first century. The literature on tramping that he traverses thus potentially expresses a critique or rejection of productivity as a form of resistance to the growing dichotomy of the deserving versus the underserving poor in nineteenth-century discourses. In such tramp literature, Davies argues, the tramp could represent an alternative to prevailing social norms and hence be connected to a "wider radical discourse that questions the fetishization of work" (3). While offering this intriguing, thought-provoking concept, The Tramp in British Literature displays wide-ranging research on the history and in particular the political discourse surrounding the homeless. The study is well-structured and indeed very clearly signposted, allowing the reader to navigate this wealth of information and detailed analysis. Thus, in order to define modern ideas of vagrancy, the book also offers a brief history that reaches back into the sixteenth century. Davies's strongest point, however, is the application of divergent theoretical paradigms (such as estrangement theory, the Frankfurt School, and postcapitalist theory, among others) to bring together different discourses on the tramp as a construct and a literary figure. Equally...

Jonah Isaac Salz

This article chronicles the life and work of Jonah Salz, a theatre director, producer, teacher, scholar, and translator, who co-founded both the Noho Theatre Group (1982) and the Traditional Theatre Training (TTT) program (1984) in Kyoto, together with kyōgen actor Shigeyama Akira. Salz was the editor-in-chief of A History of Japanese Theatre (Cambridge UP 2016); has written and published extensively on Samuel Beckett, intercultural theatre, contemporary kyōgen, and actor training; as well as translated traditional and newly written (shinsaku) works for the page and stage. He has been a member of the Faculty of International Studies at Ryukoku University in Kyoto since 1996, where he teaches comparative theatre and film. For the past four decades he has been an indispensable intermediary for innumerable scholars, artists, and graduate students from all over the world conducting research in Japan.

Why We Hate‐Watch: The Role of Nostalgia and Investment in WWE Viewership

Why We Hate‐Watch: The Role of Nostalgia and Investment in <scp>WWE</scp> Viewership

Kevin R. McNamara, "The City in American Literature and Culture" (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021), 350 pp.

Kevin R. McNamara, "The City in American Literature and Culture" (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021), 350 pp.

Hardboiled Hysterics: Shell Shock and Tough Guys inThe Maltese Falcon, 1929/1941

Hardboiled Hysterics: Shell Shock and Tough Guys in<i>The Maltese Falcon</i>, 1929/1941

Playing with Phantoms: Decoding the Ludic Language of Metal Gear Solid V

Playing with Phantoms: Decoding the Ludic Language of <i>Metal Gear Solid V</i>

The Dickens Checklist

The Dickens Checklist Dominic Rainsford (bio) The Dickens Checklist, recording new publications, doctoral dissertations, and online ressources of significance for Dickens studies, appears in each issue of the journal. A cumulative edition of the Checklist, consisting of listings since vol. 37, no. 1 (March 2020), is available at dickenssociety.org, and will be updated once a year. Secondary Sources: Biography and Criticism Baynes, Tom. "Three New Sources for 'Locksley Hall': Goethe, Byron, and Dickens." Notes & Queries, vol. 68, no. 3, Sept. 2021, pp. 299–301. [OT] Boehmer, Elleke, and Dominic Davies. "Empire: The Nineteenth-Century Global Novel in English." Globalization and Literary Studies, edited by Joel Evans, Cambridge UP, 2022, pp. 80–94. [DS] Cambridge, Nicholas. Bleak Health: The Medical History of Charles Dickens and His Family. Edward Everett Root Publishers, 2022. Cook, Susan E. "Hidden Mothers: Forms of Absence in Victorian Photography and Fiction." Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, vol. 17, no. 3, Winter 2021, www.ncgsjournal.com/issue173/cook.html. [BH] Dickens Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 2, June 2022. [Edin Plevljaković, "Charles Dickens's International Copyright Advocacy and Its Indirect Reflection in Martin Chuzzlewit," pp. 121–37; Lee Jackson, "Dickens and the Historical Imagination," pp. 138–58; Mizuki Tsutsui, "The Morality of Fiction-Making in Our Mutual Friend," pp. 159–75; William F. Long, "'Particulars as to the Proposed Interment of Charles Dickens at Rochester,'" pp. 176–99; Catherine Waters, "'An Evening with Charles Dickens' on the Nineteenth-Century Lecture Circuit," pp. 200–14; Winter Jade Werner, review of Dickens and the Bible: "What Providence Meant," by Jennifer Gribble, pp. 215–17; Dominic Rainsford, review of The Artful Dickens: Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist, by John Mullan, pp. 218–22; Iain Crawford, review of Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion, by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, pp. 222–26; Valerie Purton, review of The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, by Giles Whiteley, pp. 226–29; Dominic Rainsford, "The Dickens Checklist," pp. 232–35] Dickens Studies Annual, vol. 53, no. 1, 2022. [The Editors, Introduction, pp. v-viii; John Gordon, "Troilism, David Copperfield, and the Problem of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick," pp. 1-19; Sharon Murphy, "'[A] hungry, ragged, and forsaken little boy': The Significance of the Street Arab(s) in The Moonstone and The Sign of Four," pp. 20-41; Mark M. Hennelly Jr., "Through the Looking-Glass: 'Full of All Manner of Curious Things,'" pp. 42-69; Lydia Craig, "An Overview of Digital Resources for the Study of Victorian Fiction," pp. 70-87; Leslie S. Simon, "Recent Dickens Studies: 2020," pp. 88-175; Edward Guiliano, Anne Humphreys, and Natalie McKnight, "Ways of Seeing Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction, Volumes 1–52," pp. 176-238.] The Dickensian, vol. 118, part 1, no. 516, Spring 2022. [Emily Bell, "From the Editor," pp. 3–4; Maria Ioannou, "'[M]ore letters to write … than the Home Secretary': The Relationship Between Dickens's Letters and the Writing of His Characters in Bleak House and Great Expectations," pp. 6–21; Colin Flight, "The Mystery of 'Edwin Drood': An Architectural Clue," pp. 22–27; William F. Long, "Mr Dickens Encloses a Trifle: Early Acts of Benevolence," pp. 28–39; Takashi Yoshinaka, "A Note on the Ambiguity of 'Out' in Great Expectations," pp. 40–42; Robert Butterworth, "'The Hymn of the Wiltshire Labourers' and Its Contexts," pp. 43–56; Paul Schlicke, "Dickens in My Life," pp. 57–60; Malcolm Andrews, Letter to the Editor [re the Pickwick Club], pp. 61–62; Catherine Quirk, review of Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical, by Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, pp. 64–66; Rick Allen, review of The Urban Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century European Literature: City Fissures, by Patricia Garcia, pp. 67–69; Valerie Tosi, review of Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire, by Philip Steer, pp. 70–72; Katie Holdway, review of Picturing Pickwick: The Art of The Pickwick Papers, exhibition at the Charles Dickens Museum, pp. 74–76; Lydia Craig, review of Mr Dickens is Coming!, performance by Gerald Dickens, pp. 77–79; Nigel Rodenhurst, review of The Tender Bar, film directed by George Clooney, pp. 80–81; James Hamby...

Threshold Modernism: New Public Women and the Literary Spaces of Imperial London by Elizabeth F. Evans

Reviewed by: Threshold Modernism: New Public Women and the Literary Spaces of Imperial London by Elizabeth F. Evans Mary Jean Corbett Elizabeth F. Evans. Threshold Modernism: New Public Women and the Literary Spaces of Imperial London. Cambridge UP, 2019. xii + 261 pp. Threshold Modernism integrates several distinctive approaches to literary and cultural analysis in engaging, insightful ways. Elizabeth F. Evans charts the emergence of (primarily) middle-class women, actual and fictional, into turn-of-the-century London's public sphere, with particular attention to their work in shops, their presence on streets, and their participation in clubs. She argues as well that the new visibility of such women gave "perceived outsiders . . . a method for articulating their own belonging in the imperial city" (6), a point most closely borne out in her final chapter on the reverse imperial ethnographies undertaken by colonial men of color. And because it [End Page 574] takes its initial bearings from late-Victorian developments, the study extends modernism's temporal and spatial dimensions in provocative fashion, establishing the centrality of women's increasingly palpable participation in the London scene between 1880 and 1940 to "the material and ideological transformations of the age" (7). If the "public woman" (6) had long been shorthand for the prostitute, while "the new woman" (22) could be alternately construed as sexless or oversexed, then the term "new public woman" (6) foregrounds "the notably public presence of women nonetheless claiming respectability" (15), some of whom were "simultaneously the object of the gaze and its knowing conductor" (28). The first chapter, which closely analyzes visual and verbal representations of the barmaid, develops a genealogy that links this type (and several others) through their participation in everyday life—as walkers, workers, or activists—and not just as objects of display. To register the dual status of the "new public woman" (6) as both spectacle and spectator, Evans coins the term "spectacality" (27), of which Édouard Manet's Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère (1882) forms an apt example. While the barmaid may be figured as a type, for example, she potentially leverages her visibility for her own ends, suggesting that even such types contain the seeds of a subjectivity forged in the interplay between looking and being looked at. The second chapter considers three very different fictions of the shopgirl. In her discussion of Millicent Henning from Henry James's The Princess Casamassima (1886), Evans claims that this "strikingly underanalyzed character" (43) is much more "integral to the novel's main plot" (45) than most critics have noted. Millicent exemplifies James's own fascination with "spectacality" (27) in her "occupation of public rather than private spaces" (53), and Evans makes the important point that readers have no access to either Millicent's rooms or her consciousness. The agency she derives from her liminal status—not a "public woman" (6), in the sexual sense, but not a lady either—contrasts sharply with that of other shopgirl characters Evans considers. With their father's death issuing in the loss of financial and social status, the Lorimer sisters of Amy Levy's The Romance of a Shop (1888) start up a photography business, while only the youngest, most marriageable of the four orphaned Madden sisters in George Gissing's The Odd Women (1893) becomes a shopgirl. Thus, the concerns these fictions develop—about how to manage an enterprise or conduct a courtship—derive in good part from the declining class fortunes of respectable ladies. While being on display incurs sexual risk for characters in each text, Evans also emphasizes [End Page 575] these female figures' access to the broader terrain of London life: as in her discussion of The Princess Casamassima, the inclusion of maps that locate characters' homes around the metropolis as well as their sites of work, meeting spots, and public transport conveys the scope and limits within which these new public women operate. A subtle shift in the maps of the third chapter, from marking physical locations to tracking character movements around the city, implies the simultaneous shift in attention from late-Victorian to modernist writers. H. G. Wells's Ann Veronica (1909) and Virginia Woolf's Night and Day (1919) and The Years...

Can the economic growth of interwar Latvia be estimated by contemporary national accounts?

ABSTRACT The paper provides an examination of interwar Latvia’s national accounts, checking their usability for estimating interwar economic growth performance. According to the authoritative account of Roses and Wolf [(2010). Aggregate growth, 1913–1950. In S. Broadberry, & K. H. O’Rourke (Eds.), The Cambridge economic history of modern Europe, vol 2. 1870 to the present (pp. 183–207). Cambridge UP.], based on indirect estimation methods, Latvia’s GDPpc growth rate from 1929 to 1938 was the highest in Europe. However, according to Aizsilnieks [(1968). Latvijas saimniecības vēsture, 1914–1945. Daugava.] interwar national income estimates show that the Latvian economy stagnated in the 1930s. This paper’s main findings are that applying historical price indices to the existing interwar output estimates supports the stagnation thesis. However, the national income estimates lack validity and reliability due to unpersistent or unknown methodology. Hence, changes in real output cannot be established without new calculations according to the contemporary System of National Accounts (SNA 2008) framework.

Tragedy and the Modernist Novel by Manya Lempert

Reviewed by: Tragedy and the Modernist Novel by Manya Lempert Gabriel Hankins Manya Lempert. Tragedy and the Modernist Novel. Cambridge UP, 2020. ix + 241 pp. Manya Lempert begins her study with the admirably clear double question: "why did modern European novelists value ancient tragedy" (1) and why do we now? Her answer ranges over both ancient and contemporary philosophical and literary ground. On the philosophical side, she moves from Aristotle and Plato to Nietzsche, Judith Butler, Martha Nussbaum, and Simon Critchley; and on the literary side, she takes in a wide range of different modernists, from Thomas Hardy to Virginia Woolf to Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett. Her thinking is exemplary in seriously considering both the philosophical treatments of ancient tragedy in modernist and contemporary literature, and the historical reception of ancient tragedy by the modernists themselves. Ancient tragedy itself is a highly contested and historically contingent term, both in the modernist period and now. The term might refer to the Sophoclean tragedies, which are concerned with the tragic fall of an exemplary culture hero, as in the Oedipus myth that has generated one modernist line of thought. It might mean the tragedy that features the other Oedipus, at Colonus, who, though elderly and blinded, pronounces that "all is well" (113), a remark that Albert Camus takes as his own. Or it might refer to the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, which are concerned with collective grief, lamentation, and the response to atrocity. Lempert is primarily concerned with the latter strain of collective tragedy, a mode not invested in the reaffirmation or resolution of the individual or culture in the face of a divine cosmos ruled by chance and tuchê (luck), but in modernist fiction's sense of "tragic sociality" (28). Lempert's treatment of Hardy and Woolf offers convincing readings of the transformation of received notions about tragedy in British fiction around the turn of the century, a moment when Greek tragedy was both highly valued and antithetical to much of its surrounding political culture. Lempert resists ascribing the Christian framework of individual guilt to the tragedies of Tess and Sue (in Hardy). Christian interpretive schemata work both within Hardy's texts and outside them to condemn fallen women for what was done to them, an individualizing view that arises in part out of Aristotle's own misreading, for Lempert. Against this individualization of guilt, Hardy arranges the crushing force of inhuman Nature. Woolf sees Hardy as "the greatest tragic writer among English novelists" (5) and registers his characteristic settings of individual life within a vast natural chaos in her fiction, along with the influence of Janet Case and Jane Ellen Harrison, whose Themis (1912) is an important text here. Lempert registers an important critical debate: does tragedy "promote individualism and authorize patriarchal violence" (66), on [End Page 381] the view of Harrison (and perhaps of Jacob's Room), or does it allow women's political voices and protests to be newly heard? Woolf's thinking changes on this question, perhaps. The best source for her early engagement with masculinist (and imperialist) uses of Greece, in Jacob's Room, receives little treatment here. The fourth chapter engages a wide range of debates on the use of tragedy in Camus's thought and fiction, centering on the contemporary debates between Camus and Sartre over committed politics, the colonial occupation of Algeria, and the role of tragic rebellion or indifference. Camus's Oedipus is that of Colonus, pronouncing that "all is well" (113); Camus determines that his hero Sisyphus "too concludes that all is well" and that "we must imagine Sisyphus happy" (114). A wide range of Camus's tragic heroes are read as tragic counterpoints in a larger renovation of tragic fiction, from his first heroine Janine to Clamence in The Fall to Meursault in The Stranger. Lempert contends that Camus sees Meursault's famously motiveless killing of the Arab as an indictment of modern nihilism, not as an enactment of a colonialist abstraction. Meursault is a bad nihilist, not aware of the limits imposed on action in a tragic conception of life. Blinded by the "absurd Algerian sunlight" (143), Meursault kills, unable to shed the "second light" of the...

The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century by Charles LaPorte

Reviewed by: The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century by Charles LaPorte Marija Reiff (bio) The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century by Charles LaPorte; pp. 213. Cambridge UP, 2021. Charles laporte begins his engaging examination of Victorian "bardology" (a term he invents as a counter to George Bernard Shaw's pejorative "bardolatry") with a simple request to the reader: to view the [End Page 131] Victorians' literary and religious investments in Shakespeare with "readerly sympathy" (24). This modest admonishment belies the capacious sweep of LaPorte's thesis, which details not just the Victorians' penchant to read Shakespeare through a religious lens but also the indebtedness of contemporary literature departments to reading literature, and Shakespeare in particular, with competing pieties that mirror those of nineteenth-century scholars. Although the bulk of The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare focuses on archival work, with each of its five chapters exploring little-known documents that reveal the creative ways Victorians imbued Shakespearean texts with religious meaning, LaPorte aims to do more than just recuperate the ostensibly naive Victorians who worshipped Shakespeare with a cult-like reverence and produced dubious, frequently humorous scholarship. Rather, he seeks to re-enchant literary studies as a whole by reclaiming the Biblical-studies roots of its hermeneutic past. LaPorte traces the origins of cultic Shakespeare and contemporary literary criticism to the appearance of Higher Criticism, which treated the Bible not as the direct word of God but as an ancient, possibly mythical text worthy of critical examination. In LaPorte's account, as Higher Criticism transformed the Bible from the factual word of God into the "inspired poetic expression" of God, "the most sublime secular poetry" showed promise "to become its own Bible, as well" (33). In light of the Higher Criticism, Shakespeare came to be seen as a Biblical supplement, a type of modern-day prophet. This move to make Shakespeare into something of a fifth Evangelist is evidenced through a trove of artifacts found from the mid-1800s on, most notably the proliferation of "Shakespeare sermons" and the appearance of Shakespearean devotional books, which mined Shakespeare's plays and sonnets for their possible theological and religious meanings. LaPorte's book is at its best and most illuminating in the first three chapters, wherein he explores these archival materials. Chapter 1 examines the "occasionally ridiculous, invariably quaint" Shakespeare sermons of the nineteenth century (24). These sermons treated Shakespeare's wisdom much like the Bible's: that is, as "timeless, universal, and divinely inspired" (29). These sermons had their heyday in the celebrations of Shakespeare's tercentenary, in 1864, and they proliferated both in the pulpit and in published pamphlets. They looked to Shakespeare's plots and his characters' words to reveal truths about sin, temptation, and corruption, topics that could be placed within the framework of a larger Christian discourse. If the Shakespeare sermons connected Shakespearean wisdom to Biblical wisdom, then the appearance of devotional Shakespeare volumes, the subject of chapters 2 and 3, flat-out conflated them. These volumes placed Shakespeare's work in dialogue with the Bible, often comparing individual phrases with analogous phrases from the holy book. While the Shakespeare sermons often pulled religious meaning out of Shakespeare's themes, these [End Page 132] printed devotional works moved beyond thematic meaning and instead focused on exact words or phrases and their supposed Biblical counterparts. This direct comparison was indicated not simply by their content, but also by their mise-en-page, wherein Shakespeare's words were placed on facing pages to the Bible's, often in matching fonts. LaPorte argues that these devotional texts became a sort of "secondary Bible, showing divine wisdom refracted through English genius" (64). These cuttings and juxtapositions were often absurd in the context of the plays themselves and could only be examined for wisdom when removed from the intricacies of Shakespeare's plots. LaPorte argues that these compilers frequently exhibited a "sublime indifference to literary contexts" (84), with Victorian scholars drawing ostensibly meaningful moral lessons from Shakespearean villains and clowns. Such creative interpretations oftentimes went far beyond the confines of the text, and LaPorte draws our attention to other such instances of "hermeneutic extravagance...

The New Hemingway Studies ed. by Suzanne del Gizzo and Kirk Curnutt

Reviewed by: The New Hemingway Studies ed. by Suzanne del Gizzo and Kirk Curnutt Katie Warczak The New Hemingway Studies. Edited by Suzanne del Gizzo and Kirk Curnutt. Cambridge UP, 2020. 318 pp. Hardcover $99.00. "On or about May 1986 Hemingway studies changed irrevocably" is how Suzanne del Gizzo and Kirk Curnutt describe the shift in Hemingway scholarship following The Garden of Eden's publication (10). While not as explicitly groundbreaking, 2000 was another watershed year for the field and The New Hemingway Studies convincingly lays out why. As del Gizzo and Curnutt explain in their introduction, around 2000 it became clear Hemingway "was not going anywhere" and new avenues of exploration dedicated to the [End Page 146] author and his literature emerged (9). Given the amount of scholarship that has appeared in the last 20 years, addressing where the field has been along with where it may go is an ambitious undertaking. However, The New Hemingway Studies does it with aplomb; del Gizzo and Curnutt have brought together 15 excellent essays that thoughtfully summarize and offer commentary on Hemingway studies' development thus far in the twenty-first century. The collection opens with Part I: The Textual Hemingway, which focuses on one of the most fruitful areas of Hemingway scholarship: textual studies. Curnutt begins this section by examining new trends in Hemingway biography, including digging into particular periods of the author's life, drawing attention to Hemingway's relationships, and family memoirs. While each format's approach is different, a common thread Curnutt identifies is Hemingway's demythologization as a "Great Man" in favor of more balanced portrayals. Robert W. Trogdon's chapter on editing suggests issuing corrected, scholarly versions of Hemingway's work may further nuance understandings of the author, as current editions "are riddled with errors and contain alterations forced upon [Hemingway] by Maxwell Perkins and other editors" (37). With Hemingway's literature starting to enter the public domain, opportunities to publish corrected editions will arise and, Trogdon indicates, should be taken up. From biography and editing, the collection moves to the textual material Hemingway left behind. As Verna Kale and Sandra Spanier articulate in their chapter on the author's correspondence, increased access to Hemingway's letters means new scholarly opportunities. These include re-evaluating Hemingway's relationships with controversial figures such as Gertrude Stein and Mary Hemingway as well as myriad options for digital humanities projects. Letters, as Krista Quesenberry explains in the following chapter, are far from the only material items Hemingway left behind. From pictures in biographies to objects in his archives and literature, "there is plenty of stuff left to consider" and Quesenberry outlines object studies' usefulness for engaging this material (75). Laura Godfrey similarly highlights the opportunities new critical approaches offer. The digital humanities have improved Hemingway's accessibility by digitizing his works and some archival material, but Godfrey suggests this access can be increased further through, for instance, creating digital maps for Hemingway's biographical and fictional spaces. Part II: Identities shifts focus to critical lenses for analyzing the author and his literary output. del Gizzo's opening essay poignantly highlights how Hemingway's family is crucial for understanding the writer and his literature, [End Page 147] particularly in regard to mental health, fatherhood, and the ways Hemingway writes about children. David Wyatt's chapter on Hemingway and pleasure moves from the author's familial relationships to his connections with food and sex. The rise in Hemingway recipe books—along with the writer's textual emphasis on eating, food, wine, and pleasure—connects him to modern foodie culture and, as Wyatt shows, makes more food- and pleasure-centered analyses fruitful avenues for future Hemingway scholarship. The remaining four chapters in Part II are invaluable for scholars looking to understand trauma, queerness, race, and celebrity in relation to Hemingway. As Sarah Anderson Wood explains in her chapter, trauma studies is a relatively new field with great promise for Hemingway because "the representation of pain and coping functions as a conduit for bridging biography and fiction" in examinations of the man and his work (137). Queer studies has a longer history—both in literary criticism and Hemingway studies—but as Debra A...