Cambridge UP Research Articles

Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (eds.), The Cambridge History of American Theatre: Post-World War II to the 1990s, Cambridge History American Theatre, Vol.3, Cambridge UP, 2000, xviii+582pp.

Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (eds.), The Cambridge History of American Theatre: Post-World War II to the 1990s, Cambridge History American Theatre, Vol.3, Cambridge UP, 2000, xviii+582pp.

Robert Weimann, Author's Pen and Actor's Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare's Theatre, Cambridge UP, 2000., viii+298.

Robert Weimann, Author's Pen and Actor's Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare's Theatre, Cambridge UP, 2000., viii+298.

Stephen B. Dobranski. Milton's Visual Imagination: Imagery in Paradise Lost. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. xiii + 219pp. ISBN 13: 9781107094390. £64.95 (cloth).

Milton QuarterlyVolume 51, Issue 1 p. 50-53 Review Stephen B. Dobranski. Milton's Visual Imagination: Imagery in Paradise Lost. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. xiii + 219pp. ISBN 13: 9781107094390. £64.95 (cloth). Colin Burrow, Colin Burrow All Souls College, OxfordSearch for more papers by this author Colin Burrow, Colin Burrow All Souls College, OxfordSearch for more papers by this author First published: 16 May 2017 https://doi.org/10.1111/milt.12195Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume51, Issue1March 2017Pages 50-53 RelatedInformation

Bibliography of Books, Chapters and Journal Articles on Colonialism and Imperialism Published in English in 2016

Bibliography of Books, Chapters and Journal Articles on Colonialism and Imperialism Published in English in 2016 Marcella Fultz Marcella Fultz comp. Books Abbondanza, Gabriele. Italy as a Regional Power: The African Context from National Unification to the Present Day. Ariccia: Aracne, 2016. Google Scholar Adeney, Martin. Baggage of Empire: Reporting Politics and Industry in the Shadow of Imperial Decline. London: Biteback, 2016. Google Scholar Ageel, Ghada, ed. Apartheid in Palestine: Hard Laws and Harder Experiences. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2016. Google Scholar Ahuja, Neel. Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species. Durham: Duke UP, 2016. Google Scholar Aitken, Ian. The British Official Film in South-East Asia. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Google Scholar Alamo-Pastraqna, Carlos. Seams of Empire: Race and Radicalism in Puerto Rico and the United States. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2016. Google Scholar Aldrich, Robert and Cindy McCreery, eds. Crowns and Colonies: European Monarchies and Overseas Empires. Manchester: U of Manchester P, 2016. Google Scholar Alecou, Alexios. Communism and Nationalism in Postwar Cyprus, 1945–1955. Cham: Springer, 2016. Google Scholar Ali, Muhamad. Islam and Colonialism: Becoming Modern in Indonesia and Malaya. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2016. Google Scholar Allan, Michael. In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2016. Google Scholar Allen, Amy. The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 2016. Google Scholar Allender, Tim. Learning Femininity in Colonial India, 1820–1932. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016. Google Scholar Alshaer, Atef. Poetry and Politics in the Modern Arab World. London: Hurst, 2016. Google Scholar Anastacio, Leia Castañeda. The Foundations of the Modern Philippine State: Imperial Rule and the American Constitutional Tradition in the Philippine Islands, 1898–1935. New York: Cambridge UP, 2016. Google Scholar Anderson, Mark Cronlund. Holy War: Cowboys, Indians, and 9/11s. Regina: U of Regina P, 2016. Google Scholar Anderson, Clare, Madhumita Mazumdar, and Vishvajit Pandya. New Histories of the Andaman Islands: Landscape, Place and Identity in the Bay of Bengal, 1790–2012. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016. Google Scholar Anishanslin, Zara. Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World. New Haven: Yale UP, 2016. Google Scholar Antunes, Cátia and Amélia Polónia, eds. Beyond Empires: Global, Self-Organizing, Cross-Imperial Networks, 1500–1800. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Google Scholar Atçıl, Abdurrahman. Scholars and Sultans in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016. Google Scholar Atkinson, David C. The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Migration in the British Empire and the United States. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2016. Google Scholar Aymer, Paula L. Evangelical Awakenings in the Anglophone Caribbean. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Google Scholar Babcock, Matthew. Apache Adaptation to Hispanic Rule. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016. Google Scholar Bach, Ulrich E. Tropics of Vienna: Colonial Utopias of the Habsburg Empire. New York: Berghahn, 2016. Google Scholar Balce, Nerissa. Body Parts of Empire: Visual Abjection, Filipino Images, and the American Archive. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2016. Google Scholar Balkun, Mary McAleer and Susan Clair Imbarrato, eds. Women's Narratives of the Early Americas and the Formation of Empire. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Google Scholar Balthaser, Benjamin. Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2016. Google Scholar Banivanua-Mar, Tracey. Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016. Google Scholar Banko, Lauren. The Invention of Palestinian Citizenship, 1918–1947. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2016. Google Scholar Bankoff, Greg and Joseph Christensen. Natural Hazards and Peoples in the Indian Ocean World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Google Scholar Barry, Gearóid, Enrico Dal Lago, and Róisín Healy, eds. Small Nations and Colonial Peripheries in World War I. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Google Scholar Barter, Shane Joshua. Explaining the Genetic Footprints of Catholic and Protestant Colonizers. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Google Scholar Bassi, Ernesto. An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada's Transimperial Greater Caribbean World. Durham: Duke UP, 2016. Google Scholar Bates, David. William the Conqueror. New Haven: Yale UP, 2016. Google Scholar Bauer, Brian S., Madeleine Halac-Higashimori, and...

British Drama of the Industrial Revolution by Frederick Burwick

British Drama of the Industrial Revolution by Frederick Burwick Victor Emeljanow British Drama of the Industrial Revolution. By Frederick Burwick. Cambridge UP, 2015. Cloth $99.99. 320 pages. It is perhaps no coincidence that the term "melodrama" began its groundbreaking journey toward cultural and theatrical significance during the throes of the Vietnam War, which contributed to making the boundaries between high and low art irrelevant just as much as the emergence of the postmodern condition. As long ago as 1964, Michael Booth, Brooks McNamara, and Eric Bentley were some of the critics and theatre historians responsible for bringing to our attention the rich [End Page 130] values of popular entertainments among which melodrama proved to be an enduring dramatic genre. Since then critical works have proliferated exponentially, starting with examinations of the content of melodrama and its various manifestations to a status in which theatre historiography has recognized the conditions which gave rise to melodrama and, more importantly, the social and cultural seedbed out of which it sprang and which the genre never forgot. It is in this context that Frederick Burwick's recent book should be placed: it both reinforces the contemporary scholarly interest in melodrama as social documentation, and positions the form as a demonstration whereby the conditions of living could be made immediately accessible to both metropolitan and provincial spectators. Those conditions were of course inextricably tied to the consequences of the Industrial Revolution between 1780 and 1840 in particular. Jane Moody's volume, Illegitimate Theatre in London 1770-1840 (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Burwick's Playing to the Crowd: London Popular Theatre 1780-1830 (Palgrave, 2011) both focus on theatres in London, the magnet city that drew those who had been deracinated by the turmoil of industrial change in the British provinces during the period under discussion. Burwick's new book, however, charts a journey that starts in London as players joined provincial theatre companies to perform plays with which they had become identified in the metropolis. As well, that journey enabled theatre practitioners to select their vehicles, which they regarded as appropriate for the particular venues and towns where they toured. In so doing, they were able to support the need for solidarity by performing plays that might reflect the immediate concerns of their audiences, whether they comprised out-of-work handloom weavers (who were part of the cotton, wool, or carpet industries), steel workers, miners, or even the tradesmen and members of the Friendly Societies who sponsored individual performances. Burwick's contention is that "the meaning of a play changes with every change in the performance location" (10), which reflects the protean nature of melodrama and its progeny and is one of this book's most valuable contributions to the discourses around genre, theatre venues, and the composition of audiences during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Burwick compellingly develops the theme that London's illegitimate theatre became the "dramatic newsreel of the modern metropolis" by re-emphasizing the significance of "the theatre as an agency of reform directly involved with the labour movement" (7, 16). Such comments affirm the immediacy of a changing theatre culture that mirrored the struggle for political reform and social stability, both of which would elude most of the population throughout the period. Nevertheless, Burwick clearly illustrates the role of the theatre in the period as providing a dynamic and influential forum that gained its strength and relevance in tandem with the growing demand for social reform. This demonstration of the theatre's close engagement with the concerns of its audiences is very welcome. Burwick's book does this with great skill. He identifies some of the key documents that recur as their lifespan was being extended by the numerous revivals in the provinces. For example, Samuel Foote's The Mayor of Garratt, or, The Election was first performed at the Haymarket theatre in 1763, [End Page 131] but the elements of political satire kept it very much alive in provincial centers such as Huddersfield (1826) and Belfast (1837), among others. James Sheridan Knowles's The Hunchback, depicting the faults of the aristocracy, was originally produced at Covent Garden in 1832, just as the 1832 Reform Bill...

Children's Fantasy Literature: An Introduction by Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn

Reviewed by: Children's Fantasy Literature: An Introduction by Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn Amanda M. Greenwell (bio) Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn. Children's Fantasy Literature: An Introduction. Cambridge UP, 2016. In Children's Fantasy Literature: An Introduction, Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn trace the development of fantasy literature for children from its roots in sixteenth-century fable and folklore to its manifestations in the present day teen market. Wide-ranging in its text selection as well as its critical approaches, the book is the first to put the study of children's literature and the study of the fantastic in extended dialogue. In doing so, Levy and Mendlesohn have created a foundational text for the intersection of these fields. The scope of this undertaking is impressive: the authors focus on literature written in English, primarily from Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, and they include well-known as well as lesser known writers. Their critical frameworks—aside from extant scholarship on children's and fantasy literature—include historical, literary, and national contexts, material print culture, and changing conceptions of childhood and audience. Far from competing, these frameworks inform each other and bring into relief the complex interplay of forces that have shaped the production of children's fantasy literature, especially in the West. For instance, chapter 3, "The American Search for an American Childhood," reads to the rise of fantasy in the United States against the backdrop of early American distrust of the fantastic, the influence of folk and tall tales, the significance of Hans Christian Andersen, the role of public libraries, the advent of The Horn Book Magazine, and the popularity of pulp fiction—this last an oft neglected context for scholarly study of children's fantasy literature, and so much appreciated here. By engaging these frames, Levy and Mendlesohn complicate more commonly understood ancestries of children's literature by placing L. Frank Baum and E. B. White, foundational figures in American children's fantasy literature lauded by librarians, next to pulp writers such as Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard, whose work, though intended for adult audiences, became popular among adolescent readers (to the chagrin of many of those same contemporary librarians) and influenced writers such as Andre Norton and Ray Bradbury. They also note significant differences between British and American children's fantasy literature, especially regarding child protagonists' relationships with parents, and emphasize the impact of J. R. R. Tolkien on American readers' conception of fantasy. [End Page 404] Here, as in other chapters, the text knits writers together across time and geography to establish and disrupt legacies in the history of fantasy literature. Chapters 5–7 ("The Changing Landscape of Post-war Fantasy," "Folklore, Fantasy and Indigenous Fantasy," and "Middle Earth, Medievalism and Mythopoeic Fantasy," respectively) exhibit the enormity of this undertaking, as the first of them opens with this statement: "In the years between 1950 and 1990, the landscape of children's fantasy in the UK and the Commonwealth changed in both literal and metaphorical ways … [and was] so prolific, and so important to the development of children's fantasy, that we have chosen to split [the period] into three [chapters]" (101). The discussion within these sections ranges vastly. The authors examine how children's fantasy of this period developed tropes now used in fantasy for adults, trace the expansion of fantasy "fodder" from classical myth to archaeological and historical inspirations from many cultures, note the trend of pushing the landscape of the fantastic from the bounded to the unbounded, and argue convincingly for a movement from the child as visitor to the fantastic to the child as participator in the mythopoeic impulse. These, of course, are just several of the many strands Levy and Mendlesohn weave. The final chapters of the book demonstrate the ways that children's fantasy of the last few decades has both inherited these complex histories and forged ahead to create new ones. Drawing a contrast to mid-twentieth century rejections of "lipstick and nylons" fantasy (a nod to C. S. Lewis's treatment of Susan in the final volume of the Chronicles of Narnia), Levy and Mendlesohn provide a nuanced critique of...

A History of Theatre in Spain ed. by María M. Delgado and David T. Gies

Reviewed by: A History of Theatre in Spain ed. by María M. Delgado and David T. Gies Bárbara Mujica María M. Delgado and David T. Gies, editors. A History of Theatre in Spain. CAMBRIDGE UP, 2012 (PAPERBACK EDITION 2015). 558 pp. THIS NEW CONTRIBUTION TO HISPANISM by María M. Delgado and David T. Gies is an unconventional literary history. Because it is a compendium of articles by specialists, A History of Theatre in Spain avoids some of the major pitfalls that plague other literary histories. Single-authored chronicles inevitably offer a limited perspective, as no one scholar can be an expert in every aspect or period of a national literature. Even highly qualified experts in one area—say, the Spanish comedia—may be deficient in others, such as the zarzuela or contemporary feminist theater. However, the editors of A History of Theatre in Spain offer an overview of Spanish theater from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century provided by over two dozen eminent scholars of diverse backgrounds, areas of expertise, and approaches. The result is a history of Spanish theater that is panoramic, profound, and multifaceted. The editors' insightful Introduction poses some questions usually ignored by scholars. The most basic is: What is Spanish theater? The tendency of critics, historians, and politicians to equate Spain with Madrid or Castile has led scholars to overlook the existence of cultures that have flourished in the Iberian Peninsula in languages other than Spanish, for example, Arabic, Basque, Catalan, Navarro-Aragonese. Furthermore, the primacy given to Spain's Golden Age has led scholars to neglect the rich theatrical traditions of Spain's eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Theatrical culture is much broader than a selected group of canonical works, argue the editors. Performance techniques, audience tastes, dramatic space, and myriad other elements all come into play. Rather than assigning hegemony to either text or performance-related issues, the editors have sought to view theater in its totality, including script, stage architecture, kinetics, the role of publishers, and paralinguistic material. Although their focus is on peninsular Spain, they have sought to expand our notion of Spanish theater by exploring issues of colonialism and the broad influence of Spain's theater abroad, both in Latin America and Europe. The editors' frankly revisionist approach calls into questions conventional assumptions about what constitutes a national theater and the parameters of Spain's theater. [End Page 135] In "The Challenges of Historiography: The Theatre in Medieval Spain," Ángel Gómez Moreno challenges the long-accepted 1958 statement by Fernando Lázaro Carreter that the history of theater in Medieval Spain is "the history of an absence" (18). For decades it has been assumed that almost no evidence exists of a theatrical tradition between the Auto de los Reyes Magos, composed at the end of the twelfth century, and the plays of Juan del Encina, the first of which appeared in the Cancionero de 1496. However, Gómez Moreno argues that records attesting to payments for scenery and costumes and references to paratheatrical productions do survive. Furthermore, scholars are now recovering some missing theatrical texts or finding references to them in other works. To gain an understanding of the breadth of theatrical activity in medieval Iberia, argues Gómez Moreno, we need to expand our horizons. Gómez Moreno examines the liturgical theater of Toledo and elsewhere, as well as momos and other medieval theatrical forms in Portugal. He concludes, "Modern scholarship has allowed us to perceive, albeit in indirect ways, the existence of a vigorous tradition of performance during the Middle Ages in Spain" (35). The following four chapters examine different aspects of the theater of the Golden Age, impugning some widely held assumptions. In "Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca and Tirso de Molina: Spain's Golden Age Drama and its Legacy," Jonathan Thacker considers Lope de Vega, the most influential playwright of Spain's Golden Age, not only as a creator of plays but also as a theatergoer. Thacker believes that Lope's greatest source of inspiration was his experience as a spectator. By watching plays, he learned what pleased the audience. If Lope rejected the neo-Aristotelian rules that...

The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American West ed. by Steven Frye

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American West ed. by Steven Frye Geneva M. Gano Steven Frye, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American West. New York: Cambridge UP, 2016. 255 pp. Cloth, $89.99; paper, $29.99. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American West, edited by Steven Frye, represents the broad diversity of the American West's literary tradition and helpfully identifies important and enduring issues for scholars in the field. These high-quality contributions offer readers both nuance and depth, and a number provide valuable new insights into some of the more understudied areas within the field. Representing a healthy mix of well-established and emerging scholars, the collection offers readers precisely what they will be looking for from the dependable Cambridge Companion series: an excellent overview of both the primary texts and the discussions that have shaped and will continue to shape the field in years to come. Frye's introduction is broad-ranging but concise, providing a basic overview of the general topics and themes taken up by the contributors rather than a detailed account of the individual chapters. He positions the American West primarily as a geographical place rather than a historical process, locating it primarily within the current boundaries of the continental United States. California seems to claim its heart and center: half of the volume's essays primarily discuss texts or writers associated with that state. To the degree that the collection gestures toward transnational Wests, this occurs mostly in the chapters on the Chicana/o and Asian American Wests, indicating the significance of Mexico and the Asian Pacific in those regional and cultural literary imaginaries. While indispensable there, transnational threads and issues could have merited consideration elsewhere as well. The volume's chapters are organized more or less chronologically, an editorial decision emphasizing the historicity of literary genres. Predictably, perhaps, Frye's western literature begins with the advent of Europeans, a well-established starting point in American literary history. The first chapter prioritizes Spanish rather than Anglo-American exploration narratives, reminding readers there were many Wests, not only the Anglo-American ones most [End Page 353] familiar to scholars in the field. M. Carmen Gomez-Galisteo's fine, well-researched essay is the best example here of how the transnational turn in western American literary studies can help us see new texts as well as older texts anew: Gomez-Galisteo shows how the conditions of literary production in Spain significantly influenced explorers' visions and descriptions, implicitly inviting us to compare these with the expectations of the West in the Anglo-American context. Susan Kollin's strong contribution also reflects on one of the most compelling currents in scholarly interest over the past generation or so: the literature of environmental consciousness. Her essay eloquently narrates the trajectory of the tensions and transformations within the environmental movement and connects this story to theoretical insights and debates from environmental criticism. Kollin weaves these carefully into her treatment of primary texts, offering her readers particularity and substance to which they can tether the larger ideas. Gioia Woods's essay on verse in the American West, though focused almost exclusively on California poets, offers a useful overview along with a compelling and detailed discussion of the San Francisco Renaissance. Also meriting particular attention for their thoughtfully contextualized presentations of focused research are essays by Marguerite Nguyen (Asian American West) and Eric Gardner (African American West). The Cambridge Companion toggles between these kinds of chapters and a smaller group focused on particular authors positioned as especially significant within the canon of western American literature. These include Elinore Pruitt Stewart and Hilda Rose (Cathryn Halverson), Sandra Cisneros and Helena María Viramontes (Linda Overman), Wallace Stegner (Robert Thacker), and Cormac McCarthy (Frye). While I wondered why these authors merited stand-alone chapters while any number of other—arguably more important—authors did not, each of these chapters offers a satisfying account of its subject's contributions to the literary West. The Cambridge Companions are consistently engaging and useful without being exhaustive, and this one is no exception. The absence of a chapter on the queer West is unfortunate, however...

Distinguished Fellow

Peter Warr is the John Crawford Professor of Agricultural Economics, Emeritus, at the Australian National University. At the time of his retirement from the ANU in 2014, he had held the Crawford Chair for 24 years and was Head of the Arndt-Corden Department of Economics and Director of the Poverty Research Centre. Peter began his study of agricultural economics at the University of Sydney in the mid-1960s, under Keith Campbell, John Longworth and Bruce Davidson, writing a final-year thesis on the food consumption of age pensioners in Glebe. He subsequently obtained a master's degree in economics from the London School of Economics, under Amartya Sen, and a PhD in applied economics from Stanford University, under Peter Timmer and Walter Falcon. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Minnesota and a lecturer in economics at Monash University before joining the ANU in 1980. A feature of Peter's work, from his undergraduate thesis to the present day, has been the determination to apply economic analysis to understanding the economic circumstances for the poorest people. His research has dealt extensively with the relationships between economic policy, structural transformation, technological change and poverty incidence in developing countries, including the adaptation of general equilibrium modelling to address these issues. He has published widely on the Thai and Indonesian economies, focusing especially on the determinants of poverty reduction. In addition to visiting appointments at Harvard and Yale, he has been a visiting professor of economics at Thammasat University and Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok and at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta. He has also acted as a consultant to the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the OECD, various United Nations agencies, USAID and AusAID. Peter has published over 200 journal articles and chapters in books, which have appeared in all the major agricultural economics and development economics journals, together with the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy, Economica, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of International Economics, Journal of Public Economics, The World Economy and The Economic Record. He has also written or edited three books on Thailand, The Thai Economy in Transition (Cambridge UP), Thailand's Macroeconomic Miracle, 1970 to 1995 (Oxford UP) and Thailand Beyond the Crisis (Routledge). He is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, elected in 1997. Within AARES, Peter has been an energetic proponent of developing the links between the Society and kindred professional bodies in developing countries, especially in South-East Asia. He has been an active contributor to the Society's journal, the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, and his article with an Indonesian colleague, Arief Anshory Yusuf, was awarded the journal's Best Article prize in 2011. He was president of AARES in 2013–2014.

The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches ed. by Michael Johnston, Michael van Dussen

Reviewed by: The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches ed. by Michael Johnston, Michael van Dussen Carrie Griffin (bio) Michael Johnston and Michael van Dussen, editors. The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 94. Cambridge UP, 2015. 302pp. £67.00. In their prefatory remarks, the editors of this timely volume, Michael Johnston and Michael van Dussen, highlight the tendency among many medieval book historians to produce “tightly focused analyses of individual manuscripts or small groups of codices” (1), citing James Simpson’s critique that palaeographers and codicologists fail to translate their findings into “literary criticism and cultural history.” The collection they mastermind—The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches—successfully marks a move away from such tightly focused studies toward a reappraisal of manuscripts as “objects within the cultural world, where people interact with them in meaningful, readable ways” (2). The essays ask broad questions about book culture in later medieval Europe but significantly they are underpinned by those aspects of traditional manuscript studies, and this is the strength of the collection: there are no single case studies, and instead scholars use their intimate knowledge of manuscript production and use to make “broader interpretive claims about manuscript culture” (12). It is this philosophy (not a new idea, as acknowledged by the editors, but applied to medieval studies in pockets only) that drives the collection, informing the thirteen contributions and challenging, “gauntlet-like” the “entire field of medieval literary studies” (Kerby-Fulton 243). The essays gathered here are consistently strong, privileging theoretical assessments of questions around matters such as authorship, the manuscript-print nexus, circulation, archival practices, and miscellaneity, while (necessarily) retaining a strong foundation in close readings of the book; as such they are both provocative and informative. Some of the contributions suggest ways in which we might refocus our treatment of and relationship with the medieval book. Seth Lerer’s essay opens by looking at the complex relationship between manuscript and printed books, asserting that manuscripts were designed to be unique but that early printed books, for all their indebtedness to the manuscript, were never meant to pass as manuscripts. “Bibliographical theory and the textuality of the codex: towards a history of the premodern book” (17–33) argues that early printed books and manuscripts did not exist simply to transmit authorial content but instead were [End Page 556] “shaped by the commercial, scribal, and social institutions of the time” (18). Lerer’s piece looks at how the medieval impulse to compile “shades into” compilation practices evident in early printed books, specifically in Sammelbände (19), examining also the various ways in which early printed books could be and indeed were transformed into unique objects. In “What is manuscript culture? Technologies of the manuscript matrix” (34–59), Stephen G. Nichols suggests that we are too dependent, despite our technological sophistication, on “analog protocols developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (34) with respect to our attitudes to medieval manuscripts. He suggests that we can profitably consider them a “technology,” produced in “urban micro-cultures” requiring high levels of skill and interpretative acts that are visible on each page, rather than as irregular, artisanal, and idiosyncratic objects that require to be replaced by critical editions. “Manuscripts,” Nichols argues, “situate their texts in contemporary history” (36). Jeffrey Todd Knight’s “Organising manuscript and print: from compilatio compilation” (77–95) also studies a Sammelband, here in order to think through “the complex entanglement of print and manuscript . . . in the reading and writing cultures of late pre-modern England” (77). Several of the essays offer thought-provoking reassessments of commonly debated issues and cruxes in the field medieval book history. Erik Kwakkel, in “Decoding the material book: cultural residue in medieval manuscripts” (60–76), is concerned with the kind of information that can be gleaned from the codex itself apart from in the words: the “data embedded in the physicality of the object itself” (60). His essay examines what looking beyond the textual content might teach us about the scribe, the relationship between that scribe and the reader, and the anticipated use for the volume, concluding that “book design may relate manuscripts to their milieu of production, readers, and manner of use...

Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children's Literature by Jessica L. Straley

Reviewed by: Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children's Literature by Jessica L. Straley Kate Holterhoff (bio) Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children's Literature by Jessica L. Straley; pp. 272. Cambridge UP, 2016. $104.06 cloth. Although scholarship on the relationship between science and literature has tended to focus on realist fictions by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, recent research has made room for popular and imaginative literature. Interest in Darwinism and romance fiction, in particular, has increased markedly since 2000, appearing in both multi-author monographs, such [End Page 311] as Anne Stiles's Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century (2011), and single-author studies, including Julia Reid's Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle (2006). Jessica Straley's Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children's Literature uniquely examines the relationship between fiction written for juveniles and the discourse of recapitulation, the scientific theory suggesting that organisms pass through all stages of evolutionary development in their growth from single-celled organisms to adults. Therefore, unlike previous studies that focus almost exclusively on natural and sexual selection, Evolution and Imagination places much needed weight upon the yet understudied ideas of the evolutionists and advocates of recapitulation theory, including Ernst Haeckel and Herbert Spencer. Looking particularly at books written for children and containing lessons from evolutionary science, Straley identifies and interprets several links connecting ideas about childhood development with theories about the study of literature and education. Straley's interdisciplinary book is sure to interest scholars of children's literature, the history of science, and nineteenth-century culture more broadly. Evolution and Imagination is lucidly written and often surprising, arguing that many of the best-known children's books published between 1860 and 1920 incorporated incompletely evolved or bestial children into their plots for pedagogical reasons. If ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, as recapitulationists argued, then adolescents must be properly guided from a partial to a fully evolved state. While strategies for ensuring progress varied, the liminal place of youth renders the role of education for ensuring the proper development of the race of the utmost importance. Evolution and Imagination's chapters are divided into two historical timeframes: before and after the 1870 Elementary Education Act. This division usefully underscores the importance of instruction to Straley's claims. While scholarship concerning the Golden Age of children's literature has tended to uphold the Rousseauian notion that scientific themes were included for the enjoyment of adult readers rather than the erudition of juveniles, Straley suggests that child audiences were often active and savvy readers. Authors differed on the question of how best to convey the lessons of evolution, but the place of recapitulation theory in these texts was always intentional and improving. Chapter 1 examines pedagogical texts that internalized natural theology and situated adults as curators of a child's educational interactions with nature. Straley historicizes literature that encouraged children to observe the natural world for moral improvement. Focusing particularly on Margaret Gatty's Parables from Nature (1855), Straley shows that such fiction opposed evolutionary theory on the grounds that by rejecting design, natural selection removed nature from the sphere of moral improvement. Moreover, evolutionism seemed to frame the natural world as chaotic and disorderly rather than specially created. Gatty's rejection of transmutation depended upon her conviction that in order to infer God, one must appreciate nature empirically—a requirement that the theory of evolution could never fulfill. [End Page 312] Chapter 2 studies the Anglican clergyman and evolutionist Charles Kingsley's celebrated fairy tale Water-Babies (1863). Identifying parallels with Spencer's advocacy of scientific pedagogy, Straley argues that Kingsley's complex tale was intended to teach lessons about scientific thinking to children. Unlike Gatty, Kingsley rejected the notion that the natural world could best be experienced through observation. To avoid an exclusively materialist pespective, Kingsley incorporates fantasy and nonsense into his plot. Breaking with the Enlightenment dependence on reason, Kingsley proposes that in order to learn how to become fully evolved humans, children must exercise their faculties of imagination through play. He suggests that the best scientific pedagogy benefits from a literary framework that permits speculation about non-observable phenomena in...

Bringing a Taste of Abroad to Australian Readers: <em>Australian Wines & Food Quarterly</em> 1956–1960

Bringing a Taste of Abroad to Australian Readers: <em>Australian Wines & Food Quarterly</em> 1956–1960

Exploring YouTube as a Transformative Tool in the “The Power of MAKEUP!” Movement

Exploring YouTube as a Transformative Tool in the “The Power of MAKEUP!” Movement

Fairy Tale Transformation: The Pied Piper Theme in Australian Fiction

Fairy Tale Transformation: The Pied Piper Theme in Australian Fiction

Porn <i>Suck</i>s: The Transformation of Germaine Greer?

Porn <i>Suck</i>s: The Transformation of Germaine Greer?

The Many Transformations of Albert Facey

In the last months of his life, 86-year-old Albert Facey became a best-selling author and revered cultural figure following the publication of his autobiography, A Fortunate Life. Released on Anzac Day 1981, it was praised for its "plain, unembellished, utterly sincere and un-self-pitying account of the privations of childhood and youth" (Semmler) and "extremely powerful description of Gallipoli" (Dutton 16). Within weeks, critic Nancy Keesing declared it an "Enduring Classic." Within six months, it was announced as the winner of two prestigious non-fiction awards, with judges acknowledging Facey's "extraordinary memory" and "ability to describe scenes and characters with great precision" ("NBC" 4). A Fortunate Life also transformed the fortunes of its publisher. Founded in 1976 as an independent, not-for-profit publishing house, Fremantle Arts Centre Press (FACP) might have been expected, given the Australian average, to survive for just a few years. Former managing editor Ray Coffey attributes the Press's ongoing viability, in no small measure, to Facey's success (King 29). Along with Wendy Jenkins, Coffey edited Facey's manuscript through to publication; only five months after its release, with demand outstripping the capabilities, FACP licensed Penguin to take over the book's production and distribution. Adaptations soon followed. In 1984, Kerry Packer's PBL launched a prospectus for a mini-series, which raised a record $6.3 million (PBL 7–8). Aired in 1986 with a high-rating documentary called The Facey Phenomenon, the series became the most watched television event of the year (Lucas). Syndication of chapters to national and regional newspapers, stage and radio productions, audio- and e-books, abridged editions for young readers, and inclusion on secondary school curricula extended the range and influence of Facey's life writing. Recently, an option was taken out for a new television series (Fraser).

From Reluctant Online Contributor to Mentor: Facilitating Student Peer-to-Peer Mentoring Online

From Reluctant Online Contributor to Mentor: Facilitating Student Peer-to-Peer Mentoring Online

Possessed by the ‘Exhilarating Monster’: J. M. Coetzee’s reading of Dostoevsky in The Master of Petersburg

In Dostoevsky and English Modernism 1900–1930, Peter Kaye points out that with the publication of Constance Garnett’s translations in the 1910s, ‘Dostoevsky was introduced as an exhilarating monster … on the English horizon’ (Peter Kaye (2006). Dostoevsky and English Modernism 1890–1930. Cambridge: Cambridge UP: 6). In the present article the author aims to explore the extent to which J. M. Coetzee’s reading of Dostoevsky in The Master of Petersburg (1994), a consistent rewriting of Devils (1871), repeats this fundamental feature of Dostoevsky’s reception in English modernism. The author argues that by recreating Dostoevsky as a paradoxical amalgam of his diametrically opposed fictional characters, by echoing some critical statements of such English modernists as D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, and by finally representing the veiled, though definitely monstrous, figure (of Stavrogin) as emerging from Dostoevsky’s mirror image, Coetzee corroborates this central figure of Dostoevsky’s English modernist reception only to deconstruct it.

Minding and Caring about Ethics in Brain Injury.

Joseph Fins's book Rights Come to Mind: Brain Injury, Ethics, and the Struggle for Consciousness (Cambridge UP, 2015) is a considerable addition to the literature on disorders of consciousness and the murky area of minimally conscious states. Fins brings to this fraught area of clinical practice and neuroethical analysis a series of stories and reflections resulting in a pressing and sustained ethical challenge both to clinicians and to health care systems. The challenge is multifaceted, with diagnostic and therapeutic demands to be met by clinicians and a mix of moral, scientific-economic, and political resonances for health care analysts. Everything in the book resonates with my own clinical experience and the often messy and emotionally wrenching business of providing ongoing care for patients with severe brain injuries and disorders, people who frequently resist the categorizations that well-organized health care systems prefer and that can dictate terms of patient management.

Grave Matters: Mediating Corporeal Objects and Subjects through Mortuary Practices

Grave Matters: Mediating Corporeal Objects and Subjects through Mortuary Practices