804 Reviews been 'dead' languages since antiquity and provides an authoritative demonstration that even the humblest, most minute reference or quotation can be invested with a discernible cultural significance or value. The governing principle in the next chapter on varieties of language purism is the juxtaposition of two contradictory attitudes: the desire to accentuate the 'pure' Saxon elements of English by excluding foreign, principally Latin, influence and the opposite desire to incorporate Latinisms in order to 'purify' English of its vulgar and low vernacular elements. There is discussion of differentattitudes to what Dryden called the Teuton monosyllables of English which concludes with fascinating examples of the use of monosyllables in poetry. The third chapter explores 'interference' from Latin that results in deviation from the norm of English, classically represented in the poetry of Milton. Paradise Lost and Joyce's Finnegans Wake are the main examples here. The historical debate about Latinate English follows, and this chapter, which concludes the wide-ranging discussion ofthe whole Latin inheritance in English, ends with a detailed examination of the sunt qui construction as it is deployed in a variety of writers. But it is perhaps the account of the Greek inheritance which follows that represents the most satisfying and original part of the study. After a brief allusion to Milton's Samson Agonistes, 'perhaps the greatest response in English ever made to Greek' (most readers would probably have preferred further examination of this response at the expense of some of the previous thirteen pages on the sunt qui construction), examination ofthe debt to Greece deals firstwith three topics: the compound epithet, negative adjectives, and English debt to Greek metrical practice. The context of the discussion is provided by the two contrasting attitudes ofthe Germans (represented by Winckelmann and Holderlin) to the Greeks that were later expressed in Nietzsche's shorthand terms 'the Apollonian' (Arnold's 'sweetness and light' in English) and 'the Dionysian' (first theoretically appreciated in English by Pater). The debt of Shelley, Swinburne, and Hopkins to the paratactical style of Aeschylus puts them in their differentways within the tradition starting with Holderlin and culminating in Nietzsche's Dionysian principle. In the case ofthe Latin inheritance, Milton figures largely but space precludes much actual discussion of particular passages. What is particularly satisfying in this examination of the English debt to the Greek (surely the fullest and most judicious handling of this difficulttopic yet to be made) is that the analysis is so clearly concentrated upon particular works: Promethus Unbound, Atalanta in Calydon, and The Wreck of the 'Deutschland' among other poems by Hopkins. Finally, there is a suggestive link through Pound to modernist poetics. At the end of his introduction Haynes remarks that his essays are designed to give 'an initial survey to a rich topic' (p. xiv); his admirably rich survey will undoubtedly stimulate more studies in this valuable area. University of Stirling Robin Sowerby Fictions of Commodity Culture: From the Victorian to thePostmodern. By Christoph Lindner. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 2003. viii + 190 pp. ?40. ISBN 0-7546-3483-3. Christoph Lindner offersa study that looks at literary representations of consumer? ism. Focusing on selected novels by Gaskell, Thackeray, Trollope, Conrad, and Delillo, he argues that, in the nineteenth century,the 'discourse of economic exchange became the discourse of social exchange' (p. 7). He also wants to make good the claim that the characteristically Victorian ways of dealing with consumerism resurface in modern and postmodern fiction. Drawing on the ideas of Marx, Lukacs, Baudrillard, and others, Lindner makes a sustained and serious attempt to explicate the terms of MLRy 100.3, 2005 805 his argument (though the inclusion of Raymond Williams would, in certain respects, have been more useful). Throughout, Lindner debates his chosen novels in a clear, enthusiastic, and fluent manner, and his readings are often persuasive. In spite ofthe author's liveliness, I have quite a few strong reservations. Given the amount ofwork on consumerism and the nineteenth-century novel, I would have liked a prominent and direct formulation of this book's distinctive contribution. Although, at various points in the chapters, Lindner distinguishes his arguments with regard to particular novels, I needed to be convinced that the...