The Historical Jesus and the Literary Imagination

Nineteenth-Century Contexts An Interdisciplinary Journal

ISSN: 0890-5495 (Print) 1477-2663 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gncc20

The Historical Jesus and the Literary Imagination 1860–1920 Andrew King To cite this article: Andrew King (2012) The Historical Jesus and the Literary Imagination 1860–1920, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 34:1, 77-80, DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2011.651289 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2011.651289

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Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780 –1820 DIANE LONG HOEVELER Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010 xx + 289 pp. ISBN 978-0-8142-1131-1 (cloth) Diane Long Hoeveler’s first foray into the dark world of the gothic, Gothic Feminism (1998), changed the way that we think about the “professional victims” of feminine gothic fiction. In her equally impressive new book, Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780–1820, Hoeveler expands her focus to explore the gothic’s engagement with the processes of European modernity more generally. Drawing on Charles Taylor’s recent investigation into the long and complicated process of Western secularization, A Secular Age (2007), Hoeveler’s book imagines the gothic as a space in which the “old” world of faith and the supernatural and the “new” world of science and reason co-exist, albeit uneasily. It is the tension between these two worlds that, according to Hoeveler, produces the “uncanny” effect for which the genre is famous. Focussing on art forms that are usually overlooked in studies of the gothic, this highly original book argues that “the gothic needs to be understood, not as a reaction against the rise of secularism, but as a part of the ambivalent secularizing process itself” (6). One of the most impressive aspects of this beautifully researched study is the way in which it broadens our understanding of the extent of the influence of the gothic on a wide range of artistic pursuits in what might roughly be called the Romantic era. Hoeveler is careful to make clear from the beginning that the focus of her book is not limited to print culture, but rather extends to include what she calls the “gothic performative imaginary” (11). This way of viewing the gothic is extraordinarily useful, allowing readers to recognise the multiplicity of ways in which gothic tropes infiltrated literary and theatrical culture during the Romantic era. In line with this approach, each of the chapters of Gothic Riffs focuses on a specific genre of what the author terms the “collateral gothic,” exploring the way in which both popular and canonical texts engage with and exploit an ambivalence about the myriad changes taking place in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. ISSN 0890-5495 (print)/ISSN 1477-2663 (online) http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2012.651280


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Chapters 1 and 2, for example, focus on the hyperbolic world of the opera, a genre with close and enduring links to the gothic. In fact, Hoeveler notes that the aesthetic principles of opera seria (serious opera) influenced Horace Walpole’s composition of the novel that began the fad for the gothic, The Castle of Otranto (75–76). Hoeveler begins by exploring the connection between the gothic and the sentimental narrative, arguing that the “sentimental ethos paved the way for the domestication and secularization of religious sentiments” (36). The particular focus of the first chapter is the relationship between fathers and daughters as it appears in the Italian operas Nina (1789) and Agnese di Fitzhenry (1809) and Amelia Opie’s novella, The Father and Daughter (1801). Hoeveler argues that, particularly in the final decades of the rule of George the Third, “daughterly piety and devotion, displayed to an errant and undeserving father, becomes an allegory for the citizen’s proper relation to an (unfortunately) mad ruler” (46). Chapter 2 examines the extraordinarily popular genre of the “rescue opera,” a type of opera based around the very gothic theme of escape from wrongful imprisonment. Hoeveler argues that the rescue opera became a space where the citizens of Europe could safely experience the threat of revolution. But finally, she suggests, “the rescue operas were secularizing productions that placed worthy bourgeois citizens in a variety of threatening but ultimately redeemed situations” (101). In chapters 3 and 4, Hoeveler moves on to explore the influence of the gothic on various dramatic forms that are usually glossed over in explorations of the genre, including the magic lantern show, the phantasmagoria, the camera obscura and the theatrical play. These chapters are, perhaps, the most original in the book, providing a wealth of information on these various phenomena. In chapter 3 she focuses particular attention on the explosion of interest in ghosts that took place in the late-eighteenth century. Ghosts are, of course, supposed to be immaterial beings, but their very representation in these media requires them to take a material shape. It is the interplay between the immaterial (the ghost) and the material (the everyday world) that becomes the focus of this chapter, with Hoeveler suggesting that it is “in the dialectical interplay between these two realms that we can see how audience members. . . are terrorized and then gradually are directed to understanding the natural laws that explain the phenomena that they had just witnessed” (109). Chapter 4 presents a case study of playwright Thomas Holcroft and his gothic melodramas (both adaptations from the French), Deaf and Dumb: or the Orphan Protected (1801) and A Tale of Mystery, A Melo-Drame (1802). Holcroft’s championing of the cause of the dispossessed, and his advocacy of the principles of a rational, secularised society (with women at its moral core), meant that the playwright “became a major voice in the securization process that was occurring during this period” (139). In chapters 5 and 6 Hoeveler moves into territory that will be perhaps more familiar to readers: the ballad and the chapbook. The ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the German works that inspired them, are the subject of chapter 5. It is perhaps not surprising that in an era steeped in gothic convention, Wordsworth and Coleridge should engage explicitly with the supernatural in their Lyrical Ballads (1798). Countering common readings of this collection that view it as a repudiation of the contemporary fad for the gothic, Hoeveler argues in this chapter that the


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“neoprimitivist” aspects of the ballad, a genre grounded in an oral tradition, “mediated in their very existence a culture in rapid flux, partly singing and partly writing its way into modernity” (163). The book’s final chapter explores the gothic chapbooks “that circulated beyond the working or independent artisan classes and eventually to the emerging bourgeois reading public who seem by 1800 to have been their primary target audience” (14). Hoeveler divides the gothic chapbooks she studies into two classes: the middle-class chapbook, which reflects the growing importance being placed on the secular notions of reason, rationality and education; and the lower-class chapbook, which tended to promote a “lottery” approach to life, in which key events are seen to be influenced by luck and superstition. However, despite their differences in philosophy, Hoeveler argues that both types of chapbook reflect an ambivilence towards the process of secularisation. Gothic Riffs is an important and timely addition to current work on the gothic. Diane Long Hoeveler covers a great deal of territory in this book, much of which will be unfamiliar even to experts in the field. However, what is perhaps the most striking aspect of Gothic Riffs is its author’s acknowledgement of the trans-European nature of the gothic in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The gothic emerges in these pages as a series of repeated tropes and poses (“riffs,” to use Hoeveler’s term) that can be found in genres as geographically and generically diverse as the Italian opera, the German ballad, and the English novel. It might be tempting to think that the global reach of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight saga and the True Blood/Sookie Stackhouse series are a product of their postmodernity. Hoeveler’s book offers us a timely reminder that the gothic was, from its very inception, a global phenomenon. CLAIRE KNOWLES English Program La Trobe University # 2012 Claire Knowles Works Cited Hoeveler, Diane Long. Gothic Feminism: The professionalization of gender from Charlotte Smith to the Bronte¨s. University Park, PA: U of Pennsylvania P, 1998. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007.

Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy. JEAN FERNANDEZ , New York/London: Routledge, 2010. iii + 207, six illustrations. ISBN 978 0 415 80438 7 (hb). In Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy, Jean Fernandez explores the figure of the literate servant “as a test case of working-class amenability to embourgeoisement” through literacy (4). As her introductory chapter points out, servants “were the largest


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category of workers for the greater part of Queen Victoria’s reign” (2), and because servants were increasingly literate and worked in the bourgeois domestic space putatively “[p]resided over by the angel in the house” (3) as a site of moral cultivation, servant literacy became a flashpoint for debate about whether it was possible to discipline the working classes through literacy or whether mass literacy was inevitably an “ill/literacy” (4) which, through its “allegiances with low culture” (4) like the penny newspapers and fiction, threatened the hegemony of middle/upper class literacy and culture. Fernandez focuses on fictional and autobiographical narratives by servants from the early Romantic to late Victorian periods, arguing that servant narration in fiction typically occurs in multi-narrator texts wherein servants’ narratives “compete for space and dominance” (22) with narrations by their class superiors, while in servant autobiography there is “a self-conscious demonstration of literacy, and efforts at generic experimentation in order to make written life history a viable project for the serving classes” (28). Chapter two, “Literary Handmaids,” contrasts the maid Jemima in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria or the Wrongs of Woman (1798), who uses literacy to liberate herself from patriarchy as her mistress Maria fails to do, with the eponymous narrator of Catherine Crowe’s Susan Hopley or the Adventures of a Maidservant (1841), who while featuring in a sensational crime plot saves the life and fortune of her master and co-narrator, but who as narrator progressively “vanish[es] from the text, replaced by the master’s omniscient narrative voice” (51) in ways that naturalize “the profitability of a servant’s literacy for a bourgeois class deeply invested in the maintenance of a social order threatened” (42) by Chartism and other convulsions of the Hungry Forties. Chapter three, “Oral Pleasures,” analyzes Nelly Dean in Wuthering Heights (1847) and Hester in Gaskell’s Household Words Christmas Story “The Old Nurse’s Tale” (1852) as texts in which “middle-aged, respectably literate women servants forgo the power of the pen, to offer oral histories that flaunt their apparent godliness, discipline, and commitment to social and civic order” (56), but that surreptitiously offer “free rein to the servant narrator as never before and never again in the nineteenth century” (85). Focusing primarily on how Nelly establishes a dominant (and desire-fraught) relationship both with her audience and competitor-narrator Lockwood and with the various masters and mistresses she serves at Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, Fernandez argues that both Nelly and Hester demonstrate “how the stabilities of the bourgeois voice . . . are echoed, mocked, and destabilized by the narrating servant voice” in ways that “demonstrate anxiety over situating the now ‘respectable’ rather than revolutionary servant” (85). Chapter four, “Obedient Servants of Empire,” examines how servant narratives in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) encourage the same kind of “suspicion” of “imperial propaganda” and historiography that “the British public . . . associated with” the flurry of “commissioned histories” glorifying the 1799 Siege of Seringapatam which begins the novel (89). Most centrally, Fernandez argues that, as a household servant commissioned by his master Franklin Blake to “steward” narration of a family history implicated in imperial crime, Gabriel Betteredge “expos[es] the servitude of the official historian” (90), even as Betteredge’s comic incompetence before his task makes him “the vehicle and medium by which narrative failure may be written into the text” (96).



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In her fifth chapter, Fernandez explores “the ambiguous character of [the butler] Poole’s filial yet fatal act of narration” in Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), stressing how as “a tale where a butler’s perplexity over his master’s identity results in the latter’s death” (109), the novella “displays yet simultaneously seeks to repress” the “collapse of bourgeois identity” (109) threatened by the “rhetoric of class conflict that gained increasing dominance after the Third Reform Act of 1885 enfranchised most males” (107). Chapter Six, “The Ventriloquized Servant,” analyzes “instances of the servant as literature poseur, a narrative stance undertaken for express consumption by an inscribed reader, who is a class affiliate of the Victorian master of mistress” (125). Her examples of this genre of “pseudo servant autobiography” (147), as she recasts it at the beginning of the following chapter, are The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, a servant and lover of Arthur Munby who mailed her diaries to him as part of a bizarre sadomasochistic relationship that included her dressing up as a black slave; Seduction by Chloroform, an 1850 pamphlet by “Harriet WMN” that dutiful alerts the public to chloroform as a widespread tool for seducing female servants by offering a sensational account of her own seduction; and Brown on the Throne (1871), a ribaldly satiric pamphlet adopting the voice of Queen Victoria’s “ghillie” John Brown. Fernandez concludes that even though in these ventriloquized narratives “servants’ sexualities came to be imbricated with their indecent propensities for literacy” (125) and offered for pornographic consumption by middle-class readers, “the act of ventriloquism ultimately redirects attention to the true ‘speaker,’ the ventriloquist” or “master” who ironically “acknowledges his own ‘ill/literacy’” and reveals “the inadequacies of the master-servant binary in defining social position or treating it as the index of character” (146). Chapter seven, “In Their Own Voice,” argues that life writing by actual servants is structured by the aesthetic of “momentous literacy,” wherein “extraordinary, audacious, or serendipitous acts of literacy become the gravitational axis around which narrative selfconsciousness” of working-class writers revolves (149). As an example of such lifewriting produced in context of “attempts of the working class to define itself from 1800 to 1848, ending with the failure of Chartism” (149), Fernandez analyzes Mary Ann Ashford’s The Life of a Licensed Victualler’s Daughter, Written by Herself (1844), who falls into service after her parents die and secures a pension for her husband by writing letters of petition, including one to the Queen (156). As Fernandez stresses, Ashford’s very decision to write her life as a realistic autobiography stems from an instance of “momentous literacy”: upon discovering Susan Hopley or the Adventures of a Maidservant (analyzed in chapter two) to be “work of fiction. . .. merely ‘founded on facts’,” (qtd. 151), Ashford resolves to write “the real truth” as a corrective. As contrasting instances of the possibilities for “a new sauciness and confidence” (158) in servant autobiographies afforded by “the improved economy [and class relations] between 1848 and 1880” (149), Fernandez sets the mock-heroic autobiography appended to the 1867 edition of the poems of William Hay Leith Tester, which pretends to be a biography by Tester’s Scottish Granny McDoodle (158). In counterpoint is Janet Bathgate’s pious Aunt Janet’s Legacy to Her Nieces: Recollections of a Humble Life in Yarrow (1872), in which Bathgate “renounces all agency as


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autobiographer” (165) by speaking of herself in the third person and casting her narrative as “Christian testimony rather than as life history” (165). The chapter ends by arguing that “the servant autobiographer emerges as modern individual, tormented, alienated, and fragmented” (171) in The Christian Watt Papers, “authored sporadically over several decades” by a former Scottish fishwife and servant who spent the last “forty years of her life [dying in 1923] in a mental asylum after she suffered a breakdown from overwork” (170). This is an original project and Fernandez has a keen eye for salient but often overlooked textual details. However, given her stated focus on historicizing the class politics of servant narration, Fernandez too often obscures historical and ideological agency or attributes agency to textuality and other reified abstractions, as when “the threat of servant narration [by Susan Hopley] that inaugurates the text hovers constantly over the reader, who must remain breathlessly alert for signs of breakdown in narrative control on the part of the master” (49). Fernandez also frequently digresses from class politics into overheated psychoanalytic claims, such as that Rosanna Spearman in The Moonstone performs a transgendered metaphorical rape of Franklin Blake (100-01). Routledge’s derelict copyediting has further aggravated these problems in focus, with misprints—often substantive errors like verb agreement (e.g. 95) or multiple versions of titles (e.g., 26, 29, 150)—occurring roughly every fifteen pages. EDWARD JACOBS Department of English Old Dominion University # 2012 Edward Jacobs

Visual, Material and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland. CIARA BREATHNACH AND CATHERINE LAWLESS , eds., Dublin: Four Courts, 2010. pp.273, 46 illustrations, 5 tables. ISBN 978-1-84682-231-5 (hb). Editing a book derived from the proceedings of an academic conference is a daunting task, even before it starts. For one thing, the conference call for papers can elicit responses that don’t hew rigidly to the theme of the conference but are timely or insightful. Once the conference is over and collection begins, not all presenters want to submit their papers for publication. If they do, often the editors must hound the contributors to submit their final version before the deadline. Once that is done, the papers must be assembled in a way that adheres to the theme of the conference while applying some kind of underlying unity to what can be a disparate group of essays. (The foregoing is offered from first-hand experience.) Editors Ciara Breathnach and Catherine Lawless have done a commendable job with Visual, Material and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, the thirteenth book in a series on nineteenth-century Ireland published by Four Courts. The book is a compilation of nineteen papers (the editors do not say if the felicitous number was



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deliberate or fortuitous) presented at the 2008 Society for the Study of NineteenthCentury Ireland conference, held at the University of Limerick, where Breathnach and Lawless lecture in history and history of art and architecture, respectively. The papers contained in the book are interesting and informative, and the editors have constructed a thematic framework that is both logical and serviceable. In their introduction, they provide an indication of the structure of the book and, more importantly, a rationale for both the conference and the book: the shift in trends whereby scholars in a variety of disciplines are using images as primary source material rather than as decorative embellishments. The first six papers, “History and Memorials: Fine Art and the Great Famine in Ireland” by Catherine Marshall, “Troubled Waters: High Art and Popular Culture, Dublin, 1821” by Niamh O’Sullivan, “‘Merely an Antiquarian Curiosity’: The Purchase of the Reliquary of St. Lachtin’s Arm in 1884” by Philip McEvansoneya, “From the Comerford Crown to the Repeal Cap: Fusing the Irish Harp Symbol with Eastern Promise in the Nineteenth Century” by Emily Cullen, “Margaret Stokes (1832– 1900) and the study of Medieval Irish Art in the Nineteenth Century” by Elizabeth Boyle, and “Devotion and Representation in Nineteenth-Century Ireland” by coeditor Lawless, are concerned with art, art history, and what the editors call “aesthetic nationalism” (15). The papers offer cogent observations on how visual art both expressed and informed perspectives on collective and individual Irishness. The paper by Lawless links to the next one, by Patrick Maume, “Rome and Kenmare: Margaret Cusack and Ultramontane Print Culture,” which in turn links to and leads the next set of papers. These incorporate religion, print/news trends and photography in a way that augments and carries on the consideration of the first section. The papers are “Pictures of Piety and Impropriety: Irish Religious Periodicals in the 1830s” by Robin J. Kavanagh, “Text and Illustrations in Samuel Lover’s Handy Andy” by Maxime Leroy, “From Printing to Photograph: James Robinson’s The Death of Chatterton” by Leon Litvack, and “Resisting Vision: Photography, Anthropology and the Production of Race in Ireland” by Justin Carville. The final eight papers also find a link from “racial” considerations of the Irish by the English to two men who had strong views of Ireland vis-a`-vis England. The contributors have made use of a variety of sources, including official records, translations, and prose, to round out a comprehensive picture of visual, material, and print culture that reflects notions about Ireland held by the Irish in Ireland and by those who went abroad (even if unwillingly). These are “Two Visions of Irish Republicanism Drawn up in Captivity: John Mitchel’s Jail Journal and Michael Davitt’s Leaves from a Prison Diary” by Olivier Coquelin, “‘Always with a Pen in His Hand’: Michael Davitt and the Press” by Carla King, “Sources for the History of the Irish Poor Law in the Post-Famine Period” by Virginia Crossman, Georgina Laragy, Sean Lucey, and Olwen Purdue, “Two Gentlemen of the Freeman: Thomas Sexton, W.H. Brayden and the Freeman’s Journal, 1892–1916” by Felix M. Larkin, “The Melbourne Advocate, 1868–1900: Bastion of Irish Nationalism in Colonial Victoria” by Patrick Naughtin, “A New Usagae for the Stage Irish: Sydney 1844, Lanty O’Liffey and The Currency Lass; or My Native Girl” by Kiera Lindsey, “‘The Emigrants’ Friend’?


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Guides for Irish Emigrants by Clergymen, c. 1830-82” by Sarah Roddy, and “‘Mar is fańach mar a’ teacht go cruinn mar ’ athair: Daíbhı´ de Barra’s Surviving Translations” ´ Duinnsleíbhe. by Seań O Because the chapter titles are from individual conference papers, they can appear formidable to any reader, but they do give an indication of the broad range of topics gathered under the umbrella of Ireland in the nineteenth century. One disadvantage of a conference is that attendees can often be forced to choose between two (or even more) concurrent sessions that are of abiding interest. The advantage of a book of the proceedings is that a reader can read one paper without missing another. It is unlikely, of course, that very many people will read this book from cover to cover; it is not that kind of book. But for anyone, scholar or simply someone interested in Ireland, there is a wide range of topics, covering history, art, publishing, religion, Irish language, and literature that are likely to contain information which will be new even to the most devoted of scholars. We live in a time when the digital humanities are becoming ever more significant in the academic world. Regardless of how enthusiastically they are embraced by individual scholars, they will play an ever more prominent role in academia, and the papers in this book offer an engaging look at what might be seen as “digital humanities” in the pre-computer world, during a century that witnessed profound change from its beginning to its end, in Ireland and around the world. DONALD MC NAMARA English Department Kutztown University # 2012 Donald McNamara The Empire Inside: Indian Commodities in Victorian Domestic Novels. SUZANNE DALY, Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2011. 167pp, 4 fig. ISBN 978-0-472-05134-2 (pb). “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind”: Emerson in 1847 was describing an America where economic relations had gone haywire, a land in bond to its bonded labor. Still, it is awfully tempting to borrow his words to pinpoint a certain professional deformation. Ever since Asa Briggs and Dorothy Van Ghent, Victorian things, from overcrowded parlors to chintzes to aquaria, have seemed to Victorianists, historically and textually minded alike, crucial clues in exploring bourgeois sociability, the limits of realist representation (remember Flaubert’s barometer?) and, more recently, the metropolitan effects of Empire. In the last half-decade, moreover, “thing theory” and its “object lessons” have taken hold all across the discipline. The Empire Inside, well written and illuminating, contributes to this latest turn by shedding an interesting light on the hidden side of many commodities that fill the pages of Victorian novels. Like Elaine Freedgood’s



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influential The Idea in Things, Daly’s book argues for making a new kind of sense of what is depicted only fleetingly in the text. We can do so, she proposes, by attending to a dense and significant cultural history behind objects, even if that back-story emerges into the light of novelistic day only very briefly. Daly’s focus on the importance not of “things” but of “commodities”—that is, objects that are by definition fungible and inserted into an exchange system—is intended to allow the reader to reflect on what exactly makes a particular object “auratic” at a given moment, or simply merchandisable. Her first chapter, on Kashmiri shawls, and the second, on Indian cotton (especially the virginal associations of young lady’s “white muslin”), are especially adroit at unpacking the double life of certain commodities. Once imported, after all, these objects began (like many of the foreign imports in Cranford, an important touchstone for Daly’s account) to accrue domestic associations. There is a great deal to learn from the stories that Daly tells, of Mysorean inheritance battles and the re-purposing of both shawls and Indian cottons as (deracinatable) import goods inside the British (and especially the English) domestic market. The historical analysis is acute, and the details Daly brings to light about generally understudied aspects of the commodity trade (understudied especially among literary critics) are often valuable. It is also worth noting, however, a side of Daly’s argument that brought me back to a very different moment in Victorian studies. Daly’s approach—to reveal the imperial objects that secretly structure domestic novels—follows the same logic as Nancy Armstrong and D. A. Miller did back in the 1980s, when both published books that discerned deep ideologically conditioning structures concealed beneath seemingly benign and placid domestic narratives. This hermeneutics of suspicion is exemplified, for example, in Daly’s argument that “the novels’ gestures at the historicity of British India, however oblique, allow us to undo their hypostatizing of Indian commodities as timeless embodiments of cultural difference recuperated as British status symbols” (11). By this logic, readers who try to understand the role that “white muslin” plays in terms of the formal logic of the novels in question are being deceived by the hypostatizations of Victorian novelists; to be discerning, critics are required to read more deeply back into the colonial substrate. Daly’s work, committed to bringing a fuller light to objects that by previous readings form only a passing or nugatory element in a novel’s structure is, I think, deeply indebted to the tradition of the logic of “political unconscious.” In Jameson’s influential reading of Conrad’s Lord Jim, the thrum of the Patna’s motors below decks is the “anagogical” reminder that History, whether glimpsed or not, whether explicitly present in the text or not, lies under the feet of common everyday life. Daly’s allegiance to this particular kind of depth reading sits, in unacknowledged ways, in an uneasy relationship with her richly detailed sections of historical contextualization. At its best, the historicist/contextualist part of this approach unpacks remarkable stories from the archive of the Victorian everyday, now lost to later readers: the stories of Indian cotton and Kashmiri shawls are expertly presented, for instance, and the inheritance battles of the rajah of Mysore are glossed in extremely illuminating


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detail. But Daly also performs what might be called a Jameson-inflected return to thematic reading: her readings aim to alert readers to objects that might be understood to “speak” (their colonial legacy) simply by being present in a text. Some scholars have recently made the case that this sort of analysis should be thought of as “surface reading” or “just reading,” readings which eschew analysis of genre, form, or aesthetic structures in favor of uncovering “real” objects (or things or commodities). Somewhat paradoxically, however, these scholars sometimes represent such deep thematic investigations as a move towards the surface, by arguing that they are analyzing objects which simply lie there on the surface of the texts. As if, like the scholars in Jonathan Swift’s “Academy of Lagado,” Victorian novelists were carrying around sacks of objects—tea, shawls, muslins—which they dropped onto their written pages. There are a number of problems with thinking about this approach as “surface reading,” and Daly’s book (which never invokes the term) exemplifies why. Daly’s key claim is that Indian objects in Victorian novels reveal India as “the ground on which a phantasmatic idea of India was both disseminated and undermined” (11). Daly indicts the bad faith of the novelists she examines, and her evidence lies in the “oblique” presence of objects that she asserts are being deployed to “disavow” the genuine state of affairs which prevails. This state of affairs, by her reading, is that the oppressive colonial infrastructure (this is her version of the Jamesonian “anagogical” level) really lies under the surface of the text. Hence colonial reality causes passing fetishized references to “Indian commodities” to surface (objects falling out of the Swiftian sacks) in domestic novels. Daly argues her case passionately, and with some very suggestive case-studies of how objects actually travelled from India to Britain. But to be persuaded of that colonial context, one has (as the word context suggests) to look elsewhere than these texts for evidence. The readings by themselves can function only as posterior exemplifications of a deep structure of historical exploitation that Daly has discerned—and argued—elsewhere. Accordingly, it is debatable whether she really needs or benefits from the novels she reads. One must already accept that Daly’s historical referents are the correct ones with which to explain the diamonds in The Eustace Diamonds, or the white muslin dresses in Oliphant and Gaskell. Daly offers her framework as a corrective to the “hypostatizing” she judges that her Victorian novels commit. Whether we accept her revised reading of what is happening in these novels, then, finally depends not on the “real” status of the objects that she mobilizes in that argument, or with the form or the structure of the novel itself. Instead, it has everything to do with how persuaded readers are by her own historical reckoning of what such depicted objects, or commodities, would have meant to readers of the day. Accordingly, it is on the strength of her capacity to reconstruct and redescribe such contexts as the shawl trade, the shifting meaning of the cotton import-export business, and the changing world of Brazilian and Indian diamond trading that Daly’s book will be judged. Judgment will depend as well as on how readers assess her capacity to make


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those narratives shed new light on the novels in which those objects appear: appear briefly but, by Daly’s account, tellingly.


JOHN PLOTZ English Department Brandeis University # 2012 John Plotz

Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination, 1789 –1832. JONATHAN SACHS , New York: Oxford UP, 2010. viii + 304, 6 illustrations. ISBN 978-0-19-537612-8 (hb). While the aesthetic, philosophical, and political achievements of ancient Greece and Rome have left their marks prominently on British culture, their contributions often appear collectively as a generic classical inheritance. In Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination, 1789-1832, Jonathan Sachs disentangles these Hellenic and Italic threads of influence, focusing on the latter. He differentiates Romantic antiquity from Enlightenment Neoclassicism, arguing for the prominence of Rome in the period’s novels, poetry, and theatre. In doing so, Sachs distinguishes between two attitudes toward history, which he calls “Plutarchian Exemplarity” (82) and “historicism” (39). The first, transhistorical, emphasizes the biographical in hopes of communicating the virtues and vices of famous people, as Plutarch did in his Lives, which profiles classical figures in parallel. In comparison, practitioners of historicism interpret people and events in light of their specific situations in time and place. Divided into three parts, Romantic Antiquity opens by treating “Political Writing and the Novel,” focusing on the meaning of Rome to British politics during the “culture war” (40) of the 1790s between liberals and conservatives. Sachs begins by comparing Edmund Burke’s use of Roman imagery in his Reflections on the Revolution in France with the ways Rome appears in William Godwin’s writings. Burke incorporates untranslated Latin quotations from authors like Cicero that speak to and identify his learned readership, but his emphasis on British rather than European precedents mitigates the exemplarity of Rome. Godwin, in contrast, looks to the Roman past in hopes of understanding the present and improving the future. Turning to the Jacobin novel, Romantic Antiquity explores polemical deployments of Roman themes and their effects on both the reading public and the texts it read. Sachs highlights the civic virtues that Greek and Roman republicans shared with British and French Jacobins. Just as Plutarch’s Lives offers edifying examples and counter-examples for moral improvement, so too does the Jacobin novel, which gains relevance for contemporary readers because its actions often occur in the present, not in the distant past. This allows contemporary fiction by Godwin, Mary Hays, Thomas Holcroft, and Elizabeth Inchbald to replace classical texts as models


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of virtue and corruption. Moreover, for Sachs, Jacobin fiction with its emphasis on the doctrine of Necessity takes a central place in the trajectory of the rise of the realistic novel. The Jacobin novel, in which characters appear as products of their historical moments and locations, serves as a crucial link between some novels of the eighteenth century, which feature loosely connected characters, plots, and settings, and nineteenth-century fiction, which often tightens those elements to heighten realism. Part Two examines poetry, as Sachs compares the classicism of George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and James Thomson. Byron, an admirer of Greek culture, refers to Rome during the controversy over William Lisle Bowles’s critique of Alexander Pope’s poetry. If free societies create great art, Byron connects the decline of Rome’s literature with its change from republic to empire. In a letter of 15 September 1817 to his publisher John Murray, Byron characterizes himself and fellow authors like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Moore, and William Wordsworth as ‘“Claudian”’ (117) in their similarities to that little-regarded late imperial poet, while Pope resembles the republican Horace. Shelley, whose Roman influences have received less critical attention than his Hellenism, believed that the shift of political power from Greece to Rome precipitated the deterioration of classical ideals. As his 1820 “Ode to Liberty” makes clear, Shelley considered imperial Rome analogous to post-Waterloo Britain, which fails to instantiate Greek ideals of liberty. Thus, while Edward Gibbon believes that Rome perfected Greece, Godwin and Shelley see Rome as merely transmitting Greek culture. Although Shelley refers to the altruistic figures of Camillus and Atilius Regulus in Livy’s narratives, he sees Rome as an imperial enslaver. Thomson, in his poem Liberty (1729), takes the opposite view, praising Rome as the “pinnacle of liberty” (157) because it conquers and frees nations, as implicitly Britain should do. Romantic Antiquity’s final third analyses theatrical representations of Rome, which made classical figures, virtues, and vices popularly known even to those with limited literacy. If drama based on Roman themes subtly reflected contemporary concerns like arbitrary power, foreign wars, and social injustice, these tragedies received little scrutiny from censors. Moreover, productions avoided censorship by focusing on personalities rather than on politics, with characters motivated by personal rather than by public sphere concerns. Still, tragedy’s focus on individuals makes it exemplary, and both elite and mass audiences recognized parallels between historical and contemporary people and events. The performance history of several tragedies set during the Roman monarchy, republic, and empire supports Sachs’s observation that Shakespeare’s Roman plays turned classical culture into British national culture. Key among them is the rendition of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus that John Philip Kemble performed regularly between 1789 and 1817. This production, a republican play set anachronistically in imperial settings, focused on the aristocratic hero and added scenes of ceremonious spectacle to privilege the patrician over the popular. Kemble’s Coriolanus showed the masses as irrational, manipulated by demagoguery, and incapable of self-government. Sarah Siddons played Volumnia, the protagonist’s mother, in a production whose sets contemporaries likened to Jacques-Louis David’s history paintings. Edmund Kean performed the role in 1820, in a more historically accurate production that set the



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action amid republican-era mud huts. James Sheridan Knowles’s 1823 Gracchus, staring Charles Macready, critiqued Roman democracy as corrupt and took a Whiggish tone in regard to Greek and Spanish liberation, while conflict over grain hoarding implicitly raised the issue of the Corn Laws. Unlike the earlier productions discussed, Gracchus did attract the censor’s attention, and Sachs delineates the cuts required in what he terms an “insurrectionary drama” (258). Because of the breadth of its topic, Romantic Antiquity necessarily maintains a very narrow focus, omitting discussion of the many other texts that might have fallen within its purview, as well as any mention of historical events in nineteenth-century Italy. Those studying the significance of Rome to Romanticism, however, will find Sachs’s close readings compelling and his argument a rebuttal to any convinced that Hellenism reigned unchallenged during the nineteenth century. At the same time, Romantic Antiquity participates in a capacious discourse, and I mean no criticism by suggesting that those wishing to continue this investigation might look to such other recent works as British Romanticism and Italian Literature: Translating, Reviewing, Rewriting, edited by Laura Bandiera and Diego Saglia; Romantic ‘Anglo-Italians’: Configurations of Identity in Byron, the Shelleys, and the Pisan Circle, by Maria Schoina; and Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Woman Writers and Artists in Italy, edited by Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler. ARNOLD ANTHONY SCHMIDT, Ph.D. Department of English California State University, Stanislaus # 2012 Arnold Anthony Schmidt From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature. RANDALL FULLER , New York: Oxford UP, 2011. x + 251, 47 illustrations. ISBN 0-8122-3397-2 (hb). The real Civil War, Walt Whitman claimed in the war memoranda section of his autobiography Specimen Days, would never get into the books. The enduring legacy of the Civil War in the American historical imagination, in countless studies of the war generally, and of the war as represented more specifically in American literature, would seem to prove otherwise. Randall Fuller’s well-crafted and highly readable new work adds to the list of writings about what Daniel Aaron named (in the title of his 1973 study of American writers and the Civil War) The Unwritten War. Where Aaron and other literary historians have focused not only on writers such as Whitman and Melville who took up the Civil War during the hostilities, but also writers who did so after the fact (Twain, Bierce, Crane), and from the South (Cable, Faulkner) as well as the North, Fuller focuses exclusively on a grouping of mid-nineteenth century, northern literary figures who directly observed the Civil War in their writing, if not also in person. Fuller concludes that “the task of assimilating the war imaginatively—of


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constructing a coherent narrative about the conflict that would make sense of its bitter costs and enable Americans to adapt to a changed national landscape—would fall less upon Emerson and his contemporaries than upon the next generation of authors” (221). However, Fuller further asserts that “countless postwar narratives obscured the political and social contexts of the conflict.” Writing the “real war” was its own struggle, its own real conflict. The story Fuller tells, then, recounts the attempt to construct a coherent narrative of the Civil War, during the conflict, by Emerson and his contemporaries. These figures are familiar in American literary history: Emerson, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, Douglass, Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott. Even a lesser-known figure such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the abolitionist and first Union commander of African American troops whom Fuller explores across several chapters, is brought into familiar focus given Higginson’s significant editorial relationship with Emily Dickinson. In this canonical focus, Fuller’s work might be viewed as American Renaissance ten years later; F. O. Matthiessen too was interested in the social contexts from which America’s great literature emerged and to which it responded in aesthetic form. Fuller reminds us that Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson and others in this “remarkable group of writers” were thoroughly engaged, if not utterly transformed, by the “volcano” of the Civil War that erupted the decade after The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick (8). In its fluent style of narrative and largely biographical history, Fuller’s work brings to mind the very best of its kind; it stands in proximity to other group portraits such as Carlos Baker’s Emerson Among the Eccentrics and Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club. Fuller’s narrative skills are considerable. He interweaves his “story of America’s greatest writers as they struggled to make sense of the Civil War” across ten chapters, often pairing and subtly comparing figures in one chapter and later returning to them for additional and sometimes countervailing perspective (9). For example, although Fuller considers Whitman’s war poetry in the first chapter and Hawthorne’s literary war reportage, “Chiefly about War-Matters” published in the Atlantic (1862), in the second chapter, both Whitman and Hawthorne reappear later in the book, much as the war reappears as a conflict in their own work. An 1861 journal entry from Emerson, in which the new war emerges in his dream as a volcano, effectively frames the narrative. Fuller’s discussion of Emerson’s reluctance to have his son Edward participate in the war offers insight into Emerson’s complicated (the death of his first son Waldo twenty years earlier weighing on his mind) but nonetheless real engagement with the matters of the Civil War. While Fuller’s narrative portrait remains absorbing to the very end, rich in its juxtapositions of figures and battlegrounds and in its deft transitions from chapter to chapter, I was troubled periodically by the limitation of critical perspective. Fuller rarely moves beyond the historical narrative he reads through the primary authors or, as with several cases throughout, “quoted in” a biographical source listed in his notes. While Fuller offers extensive biographical context for the Civil War narratives he recounts here, he engages in very little critical conversation—with the authors and with the extensive critical tradition surrounding these same authors—of the sort that



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is required for more thoroughgoing insights into the “political and social contexts of the conflict” that these authors reveal and refigure. It remains unclear what Fuller seeks or even claims to add in his writing of this “unwritten” war and its transformation of American literature—a war now written into literary criticism for the last fifty years. To this point, in his first paragraph Fuller acknowledges the “work of three eminent precursors: Edmund Wilson, Daniel Aaron, and George M. Frederickson,” as well as the work of three more recent scholars of nineteenth-century American literature to whom he owes a debt: Alice Fahs, Timothy Sweet, and John Dawes (ix). That debt is not made apparent beyond this acknowledgment, however, as these critical precursors, with one exception, do not appear in the narrative proper or in the notes. In this strategy of shifting discussion of his critical precursors to a very brief mention in his “Acknowledgements,” I take it that Fuller has chosen a poetics of historical narrative over a rhetoric of critical argument. That strategy may be familiar to ever-popular histories of the Civil War and its figures—and it’s worth noting that Oxford University Press, despite the subtitle, has categorized this book under Civil War history, not American literature. The strong assertion of the title, that American literature is “transformed” by the Civil War, however, remains largely undeveloped as an argument. Genre aside, this lack of critical perspective is noticeable given Fuller’s first book, Emerson’s Ghosts: Literature, Politics, and the Making of Americanists (Oxford, 2007) in which the construction of Emerson in American literary criticism is thoroughly and compellingly argued. For some historians as well as general readers of the Civil War, readers who may be surprised to learn that Emerson and Dickinson, if not also Whitman and Melville, engaged with the war as writers, Fuller’s new book will usefully expand the portrayal of the Civil War as we continue to take up its 150th anniversary. For those of us who may want and need more and fresher context for the critical vision informing Fuller’s own literary portraiture, and that of his subjects, this book will be hard to put down but may also, in Emerson’s sense of reading, be equally hard to use. SEAN ROSS MEEHAN Department of English Washington College # 2012 Sean Ross Meehan The Historical Jesus and the Literary Imagination 1860 –1920. JENNIFER STEVENS , Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2010. pp.312. ISBN 978-184631-470-4 (hb). It is a truism that our critical grandparents fully recognised the importance of religion in the study of the nineteenth century, that our parents then neglected it, and that it is now being revived in new ways, as witnessed by the work of thinkers and critics such as Mark Knight. Jennifer Stevens’s new study of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fictional prose lives of Christ is a welcome addition to this revival. But whereas Knight,


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for example, prefers an elegantly reflexive, theoretical mode, as thoughtfully alive to Ricoeur and Derrida as to the Bible, novels and poems, Stevens here undertakes an historical, literary and evaluative investigation. She records filiations: which nineteenth-century lives of Jesus were most influential, which influenced which and how? In what ways are the lives similar and different from one another? She analyses literary style: how is one to integrate (or not) such a well-known text as the Authorised Version into one’s prose? What language is to be used to portray the imagined feelings of Christ and his associates? How is one to judge the value of texts by authors who occupy such diverse niches in the market as Wilde, Corelli and Seeley? If this sounds dull to those trained in post-colonial and gender and sexuality studies, then it shouldn’t, for this book is both engagingly written and extremely well researched, with clear emphases and points to make that succeed in being both local and specific to the texts under scrutiny and more generally applicable to a wide array of texts far beyond those named. Divided into seven chapters with a brief introduction and a briefer conclusion, the volume focuses on the second half of the “long” nineteenth century, including the first two decades of the twentieth. Organised in the familiar pyramid structure, the book starts with three general chapters before the final four concentrate on Oscar Wilde’s biblical oral tales and on writers influenced by them, and on George Moore’s closet drama The Apostle (1911) and his novel The Brook Kerith (1916). A first chapter explores how the Bible was read and interpreted from the 1840s on, beginning with beliefs in Biblical infallibility shared by a wide spectrum of Christians, from fundamentalist dissenters to conservative Anglicans, though the revisionism of German Higher Criticism to atheistic Secularists. Affected mainly by the second of these three, readers started to treat the Bible as a literary text, most famously exemplified by Jowett’s essay on scriptural interpretation in the highly controversial set of essays by seven theologians known as Essays and Reviews of 1860. Overall the chapter offers a synthesis suggestive to all serious students of the Victorian period who are interested in how texts were interpreted, including those, like me, of popular reading. Chapter 2 outlines Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu (1837; first translated into English in 1842, four years before George Eliot’s better known version) and Renan’s later and even more revolutionary Vie de Je´sus (1863), and instructively appraises their effects. Renan’s text, even more than Strauss’s, opened accounts of Christ not only to biography but to travel writing of a peculiarly lyrical kind, and to the idea of the prophet as poet, later taken up by Wilde and many others. Given the commercial success of the Renan, it is hardly surprising that other lives of Christ subsequently flooded forth. Most were conservative, including John Robert Seeley’s “definitive English Life of Jesus” (49) Ecce Homo (1866), an enormous and emotive study by William Hanna (1869), and F.W. Farrar’s 1874 commission by the ever wily publishers Cassell, Petter and Galpin. The chapter concludes with a few pages on a miscellaneous collection of what Stevens calls “‘alternative’ Lives of Jesus” (66) which, while often selling well, were never taken seriously by professional theologians. In this chapter Stevens is at her best. Always possessed of a very thorough grasp of her materials,



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here she interweaves various elements of publishing history, theological debate and (a characteristic of hers) close reading inflected by rhetorical analysis to generate a richly informative purview. The third chapter moves from the purportedly non-fictional to the fictional and discussion of a curious rag-bag of novels: Samuel Butler’s The Fair Haven (1873) which sold just 442 copies and is not a life of Christ but an effort to understand the scriptures; Edwin Abbott Abbott’s Philochristus (1878) which had three editions in 40 years, suggestive of what publishers call “a long tail”; Joseph Jacobs’s As Others saw Him (1895), a liberal Jewish account of Christ; and finally Marie Corelli’s Barabbas (1893; runaway best seller). Alas, this chapter, while interesting, relies on a conception of literary value which is itself conservative and simply taken for granted. Stevens’s sympathies clearly lie with the currently high status (she finds it necessary to prove that Pater is superior to Abbott, for example) and not with the popular or the forgotten. If all four novels are found losers in a literary horse race of “quality,” it is Marie Corelli who (to me) is most regrettably dismissed de haut en bas in a way that does not address what her millions of readers must have derived from reading her. Indeed, Stevens’s book as a whole conveys an exasperation with her materials over the question of literary value: the texts she has studied mainly disappoint her. Such is not the case with the next chapter, on Wilde – or perhaps we should call it “para-Wilde” as, after a few pages on a couple of the 1894 Poems in Prose, Stevens discusses mainly Wilde’s oral tales as set down in print by Guillaume de Saix and published as late as 1942, and finishes with six pages on the seemingly more conventional Christianity of De Profundis. Given Wilde’s status at the moment it seems inevitable that Stevens finds him the most original and interesting. That aside, her discussion is valuable for returning us to the details of a Wilde who is Christian while “[i]ndifferent to the dicta of received theological wisdom” (161). The following chapter explores how three of Wilde’s associates, Coulson Kernahan, Cyril Ranger Gull and Frank Harris, based work on his biblical oral tales for their own purposes, often at variance with Wilde’s probable intentions. Here close reading is to the fore as Stevens explains the difficulties that such authors had in both maintaining and evading their relationship to the decadents and to Wilde. There is no exploration of those issues of masculinity or sexuality such as we have come to expect from the subject matter; rather the focus remains resolutely on the theological debates, and to that extent these chapters teach us something new. The final two chapters deal with the textual effects of George Moore’s ardent and very public conversion to Protestantism from his natal Catholicism. The penultimate chapter, on Moore’s play, reads very much as introductory to the more substantial final chapter on Moore’s fictional life of Christ. A rather arch refusal to contextualise The Brook Kerith as a novel published while the battle of the Somme and questions of Irish independence were both raging (248-251), in favour of conscious “artistic” motives on the part of the author, prompts us to conclude that Stevens’s analytic procedures are based on a conception of the work of art as autonomous, following its own logic and judged by criteria of excellence determined by the mandarins of the academy. Despite an entire chapter devoted

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to the novel, in the end we are told it is a failure. Yet if the work is bad, why should we engage with it? This is the main problem I have with this otherwise fascinating volume. I am not for a moment suggesting that Stevens should not have studied her topic or authors; on the contrary, there is much that is valuable and generally applicable in this book But I am daring critics who take such a “literary” stance to explore how their own literary and academic histories and present situations inflect their relationships to the texts they study – in exactly the way that Stevens (implicitly) invites us to reconsider our own interpretative strategies when reading nineteenth-century texts. ANDREW KING Print History Canterbury Christ Church University # 2012 Andrew King