Reviews: Karen L. Edwards

Reviews 16/10/06 9:32 pm Page 63
Reviews
Karen L. Edwards University of Exeter
Dominick La Capra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical

Theory, (Cornell University Press, Cornell and London, 2004), pp. xi + 274,
£28.95, £11.50 pb.
It is timely to review this linked collection of essays in the context of (for this British
reviewer) experiencing 7/7 and its aftermath, as it is a text which is greatly influenced
by 9/11. This has given added urgency to La Capra’s established interest in trauma
and limit cases and makes this a book which is likely, and deserves, to arouse much
interest among Western intelligentsia. There is certainly a lot at stake here as he nav-
igates a ‘third way’ between (for him) unattractive opposites (‘extremes’ as he would
have it) on both left and right, a number of whom have attacked him in the past. It is
a typically combative work, and La Capra is at his best when he is on the attack. In
outlining his own position he is less persuasive, however, as when he exhorts: ‘We
can work to change the causes of this cause [of trauma] insofar as they are social, eco-
nomic, and political and thereby attempt to prevent its recurrence as well as enable
forms of renewal.’ Here, as elsewhere, his gradualist hope for improvement lacks
conviction, and the ‘we’ who are to ‘work through’ to achieve change signifies no
identifiable constituency. My own disappointment with this book, and writing from
the perspective of the palpable failure of thirdwavism in Britain to do anything other
than herald a marked shift to Christian neoconservatism, is that La Capra’s media-
tory position does not itself offer (in his terms) ‘higher dialectical unity’.
Part of the great value of this book, however, is that La Capra challenges the dom-
inant view of the university as a functionalist agent of capital. The underlying assump-
tion here is that intellectuals have a responsibility to address the key social issues of
the day and to use the best research models. He is relentlessly critical of those who
would like to retreat behind disciplinary boundaries, particularly anti-theory, archival
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Literature & History third series 15/2
historians, identified as part of a ‘neopositivistic backlash’. But he also attacks

‘theories that fly too high’ and lose touch with lived reality, ‘untested by experience’.
Consistently he seeks to steer a course between such binaries, an approach which can
at its worst produce an extraordinarily convoluted style of writing. His main targets
are thinkers whom he variously brackets as all-or-nothing, theoreticist, nihilating,
rashly generalizing, intransigent, ‘with blind hope for an apocalyptic change’ and
‘complete openness to the radical other’. He is very aware how ‘alluring’ are the ‘sac-
rificial motifs’ of suicidal fundamentalism and utopic marxism in the context of
rapacious capitalist exploitation, with violence ‘justified or glorified as a transforma-
tive force’, hence the urgency with which he develops his third way theories, draw-
ing on favoured thinkers who have embraced hybridity and dialogism.
This brave book will be of interest to historians, literary critics, philosophers and
anthropologists and is a major contribution to contemporary thought, placing history
once more at the centre and helping to fill the gap left by the discrediting of
Fukayama’s fatuous announcement of its ending. Much of it will be familiar to La
Capra’s readers, as he revisits his favourite areas of trauma, empathy, identity, trans-
ference, experience and dialectical mediation between theory and practice. But recent
traumatic events in the world give this book a particular resonance and make the
reading of it a necessity. Even if it does not give the answers it is surely asking the
right questions.
University of Winchester Michael Jardine
Alice Sheppard, Families of the King, Writing Identity in the Anglo-Saxon

Chronicle, University of Toronto Press 2004, pp. 266, $70.
The exact approach utilised by Alice Sheppard for her study of selected annals from
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is not immediately apparent from the title of this book.
Drawing upon the work of Anglo-Saxon historians such as Patrick Wormald and
Sarah Foote, she identifies the lordship obligations of the king as a key component of
the English identity as Angelcynn that was first promoted at the court of King Alfred
and was developed subsequently in the reigns of his successors. That word Angelcynn,
literally ‘the family of Angles’, provides her with her title that is a reference to the
political family created by ties of lordship rather than to those of blood. Her central
argument is that the link between English identity and appropriate royal lordship was
maintained in certain texts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle over three centuries and can
be seen as constituting a distinctive English vernacular approach to the writing of con-
quest and invasion under the influence of salvation history. The book begins with a
study of the annals for the reign of Alfred and their adaptation by Asser in which it is
argued that Alfred is celebrated for dealing with the Viking armies not so much by
force of arms, but through persuading them to accept his lordship by more peaceful
means. The reign of Æthelred as presented by the C chronicler is seen as a deliberate
antithesis of this portrayal, with the ‘sin’ of Æthelred’s poor lordship resulting in the
defeat of the Angelcynn, though one that led to an eventual successful renewal of the
lordship contract between king and people under Cnut. The D chronicler is then
shown developing the theme still further with the defeat of the English at Hastings
depicted as due to the failure of the people to carry out their lordship obligations
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which places them at the mercy of a new ruler William who also fails to recognise
his responsibilities. Alice Sheppard’s analysis of individual Chronicle entries is often
insightful and needs to be taken on board by historians who hope to use the
Chronicle as a source for events in the Anglo-Saxon past. She shows more clearly than
any other previous study how the C chronicler has carefully constructed his portrait
of the disasters of Æthelred’s reign under the influence of contemporary homiletic
literature and ‘hagiographic discourse’ (a phrase that is used rather too often for
stylistic comfort). But the concentration on one theme can be in danger of obscuring
the complexity of annals which may have had more than one purpose behind their
construction. For instance, the discussion of the famous Cynewulf-Cyneheard inci-
dent from the annal for 757 through the paradigm of Alfredian concepts of good
lordship does not consider the denigration of earlier rulers who were not of the lin-
eage of Alfred which was also part of the king’s political agenda that is detectable in
this passage.
University of Winchester Barbara Yorke
R.D. Fulk and Christopher M. Cain, A History of Old English Literature,

Blackwell, 2002, pp. 346, £40.
The writing of any volume titled A History of Old English Literature requires more
than a little courage and self-assertion on the part of the authors. ‘Histories’ are
authoritative and demanding and subject to much scrutiny. This volume, particularly
given its placement within a series of such volumes by a publisher such as Blackwell,
will attract the attention of scholars in general but, more particularly, will serve itself
up as a ‘textbook’ for students within the area and it is as such that it should primarily
be evaluated.
The writing of a volume of this nature within the field of Old English is, perhaps,
especially inviting scrutiny within a market that is already somewhat crowded and a
subject-area within which there is very little that is certain. The authors have taken
an authoritative, if perhaps occasionally slightly dogmatic, stance on many of these
areas of uncertainty – a stance which will, at the very least, provide a basis for
students to interrogate through their research – whilst covering a range of material
which includes many texts that have largely escaped the critical gaze for some con-
siderable time (in the case of the vernacular Vision of Leofric, since the publication of
the last edition in 1908).
In this respect, the breadth and particular focus of the volume is to be commended,
with chapters on ‘Liturgical and Devotional Texts’ and ‘Legal, Scientific and Scholas-
tic works’ providing useful additions to the more predictable ‘Wisdom Literature and
Lyric Poetry’ and ‘Germanic Legend and Heroic Lay’ which conclude the volume.
Rachel S. Anderson’s chapter on ‘Saints’ Legends’ which is included by the authors,
draws into her discussion a great range of early post-Conquest hagiography which has
hitherto been ‘unstudied, even unprinted’ and it is in this attention to the entire cor-
pus of Old English text (rather than the material which has, hitherto, received most
attention) that the volume finds its greatest strength.
Fulk and Cain have been careful to consider a great range of scholarship on the
material they discuss and to provide the reader with considered judgements as to their
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views on the contributions made by a range of other writers – presented in a

measured and even style which is both accessible and moderate. The authors are not
averse to presenting their judgements on some aspects of modern criticism – ques-
tioning, particularly, those critical approaches which are problematic in their focus
on Western belief systems or which are in danger of applying current perspectives to
historical texts, and are at pains to present a viewpoint on the subject area which
moves it away from the perception that it is ‘antiquated and out of touch.’
This is a volume which has much to commend it. It is written clearly, expresses firm
and considered opinions on a range of useful material and provides an excellent
overview of the area for those embarking on a study of its textual material. In this res-
pect, it admirably achieves the goals of an ‘history’, particularly aimed at the student
market, and has much to recommend it.
South Bank University Philip Cardew
A. J. Pollard, Imagining Robin Hood, Routledge, 2004, pp. xvi + 272,

£15.99.
When I was sent this book for review I wondered if there was really much need for
it. Apart from the ground work of Dobson and Taylor (which is well and deservedly
praised here) there was also the much more recent contribution of Stephen Knight.
So I was not expecting to find much new. I was, I am pleased to say, much mistaken
and found this book both informative and stimulating.
Imagining Robin Hood is a book written from the perspective of an historian and
uses the various materials relating to Robin Hood to explore a range of issues affect-
ing late-medieval England. These include, inter alia, hunting practice and game laws,
social status and social inter-relationships, disorder and authority, violence and out-
lawry. It is full of fascinating material and reminds us at many points that tracing the
history of the non-gentry social groups in the pre-industrial period is still very much
a process of reading documentation against the grain. Things that were experienced
by late medieval villagers as ritualised entertainments were often seen by their social
superiors as outbreaks of outrageous and violent disorder. And, of course, it was the
courts that kept the records.
Professor Pollard’s chapters on religion and the ‘greenwood’ are of especial
interest. For example, he provides an analysis of some popular attitudes to monasti-
cism (and this, remember is in Pre-Reformation England) that goes a long way to
explain what appears to be the marked hostility to monks in some of the Robin Hood
texts. He also puts some fascinating detail into the all too often homogenised picture
of English rural life, especially as this was differentiated between the north and the
south and the sub-regions within these broad categories.
This reviewer was largely convinced by Professor Pollard’s careful historicisation
of the Robin Hood texts and associated stories. However, there might have been
some more speculation on audience there. I tend to take a rather conservative view
of medieval texts and think that in the absence of good evidence to the contrary the
only safe assumption is that they were written for an assumed aristocratic or gentry
audience. The book covers this ground carefully and includes a very detailed and
valuable consideration of the precise nuances of the word ‘yeoman’ as this developed
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in time and as it appears in the texts. However, I remain finally to be convinced that
the Robin Hood stories – as fully realised texts – necessarily had a wider audience
than more courtly romances or tales.
But this is a quibble based on a personal pre-occupation and should not be taken
as an adverse criticism of this book. In addition to its scholarly merits it is also a very
pleasantly chunky object which comes with a set of well-chosen and well-produced
illustrations. At £15.99 in hardback it is a bargain. And the book is worth its money
if only for the wonderful image of the binge-drinking Norfolk labourers who
descended on travellers in 1441 chanting ‘We are Robin Hood’s men, war, war, war’.
University of Lincolm John Simons
William Leahy, Elizabethan Triumphal Processions, Ashgate, 2005, pp. viii

+ 171, £40.00.
Leahy takes aim here at traditional historians seduced by the cult of Elizabeth as well
as the once-popular New Historicists who filter her pageantry through semiotics and
anthropology. Both, he asserts, come to similar conclusions: that the Queen’s public
entertainments cemented mutual love and admiration between monarch and subject.
The first part of the book, therefore, lays out the strong counter-argument that such
harmonious unity breaks down when displays of royal power are seen within a real
social context of misery, suffering, and physical coercion, that is, from the bottom up
rather than from the top down. Leahy generally accepts the analytical contours of
post-New Historicist scholars who entertain discord, such as Susan Frye and Carole
Levin, but he faults them also for excluding or minimizing the role of the common
person.
The noble attempt which follows, however, to put the people back into the narra-
tive of royal public entertainments encounters certain methodological problems once
the author moves from critique into history. In the second section of this book this
becomes most apparent as the impact of the pre-coronation (1558) and Victory pro-
cessions (1588) are interpreted as less-than-successful because the commoners were
facing increasing immiseration due to plague, poverty, and migration. The issue here
is that Leahy argues mostly from negative evidence – always a slippery slope. Just
because Henry Machyn’s account of the 1558 procession does not mention the
presence or reaction of the crowds it does not mean they were hostile or even silent.
And can we really infer that because a group which most commoners feared and con-
sidered criminals (including vagrants, beggars, and ex-soldiers) were unhappy with
their conditions after the defeat of the Armada, that either no popular audience
viewed the staged Victory procession, or that many may have been ‘rowdy, trouble-
some and unimpressed’ (81)?
Such analysis continues through much of the rest of the book leading to rather ten-
dentious conclusions regarding the popular reception (or neglect of the people) at the
Kenilworth (1575) and Ditchley/Rycote (1592) entertainments. Some analogies are
also suspect when made between events held far apart and within widely different
contexts. For example, the silence of the crowd at Anne Boleyn’s coronation (1533)
and the disruptions at the Lord Mayor’s Show (1617) are used to suggest possible
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disorder in Elizabeth’s progresses even though, as Leahy admits, there is no specific

evidence to indicate anything of the sort occurring during the Queen’s long reign.
In fact, while there are records of derisive comments and slanderous rumors against
Elizabeth, especially that she went on progresses to hide the birth of children born of
a sexual liaison with Robert Dudley, these types of personal attacks can be found in
any age. Even today, staged patriotic events continue to work their propagandistic
magic even as dissidents complain.
Noted historian A.G. Dickens once remarked that we cannot presume that there
were few Protestants in the early Reformation simply based on a paucity of records.
Similarly, neither should a lack of accounts noting enthusiastic crowds lead us to
believe that strong opposition did exist toward Elizabeth in her progresses.
In the end, when examining the only painting representing an Elizabethan progress
Leahy hedges somewhat when he asks us now to consider a ‘potential for resistence.’
Yes, Elizabeth’s popularity is still affected unduly by Tillyard’s unified ‘world picture,’
and this book presents a credible thesis that deserves exploration; but with his
historical methodology raising critical questions, Leahy might have left it as a critique
of existing scholarly practice.
Florida Atlantic University Ben Lowe
Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare: National Poet-Playwright, Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 2004, pp. xv + 319, £45.
Shakespeare criticism stands at a crossroads and while there is nothing new or sur-
prising about this, there is something peculiarly fascinating about the present state of
affairs. Many critics now argue that the categories that seemed so inclusive a few
years back, the labelling of people, projects, methods and movements being a very
human (if never strictly ‘humanist’) instinct, are now obsolete. Some speak confi-
dently of the (new) future as ‘presentism’, and the (old) past as ‘new historicism’; or
assert the ‘end-of-theory’ and the beginning of ‘post-theory. The terms themselves
remind us that a concern at the heart of the Shakespearean phenomenon remains,
almost too obviously, time itself. Patrick Cheney’s son, an ‘affable iconoclast and
voracious reader’ wonders why his father should ‘squander his life on Shakespeare
(p. xiii). Students faced with time-consuming reams of criticism and, these days, the
labyrinth of the internet, understandably turn to textbooks (or websites) about criti-
cism that will guide them through to some certain core of meaning. And researchers
addressing some new angle on Shakespeare may feel obliged to spend as much time
on the work of their predecessors as on the angle itself, balancing faith against cau-
tion in the originality stakes. Given this environment it is a pleasure to read a book
that not only rewards the time spent reading it, but one that admirably negotiates
with earlier criticism in an economical and productive way. Patrick Cheney’s new
book has an attractive air of originality, and is only lightly scored by the problem of
time.
While there are ideological matters at work here, it may be possible that a concern
about time, set against the sheer proliferation of criticism, has led critics in this period
of ‘post-theory’ back to Shakespeare’s life and historical environment. There is a cer-
tain comfort in addressing, as Cheney does, the immediate conditions that secured
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Shakespeare’s reputation. And if it is a question of delineation and focus, then a book

that speaks of Shakespeare as a poet rather than ‘a man of the theatre’ seems at first
to narrow the terms of reference. Yet Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright does not
belong in the recent series of biographical studies of Shakespeare. Instead, this close
study of Shakespeare’s poetry, its production, circulation, and relation to the plays,
is a complex and compelling work that shifts our attention to a national and Euro-
pean poetic scene with Shakespeeare set alongside Sidney, Spenser and Marlowe.
Given the quality of the learning and the aesthetics that governed this early modern
poetic realm, one is almost prepared to see the labelling of Shakespeare as a ‘man of
the theatre’ as something of a latter day putdown. Certainly one returns to the plays
with a slightly different sense of their relationship to Shakespeare’s reading and his
poetic antecedents and contemporaries.
Time, however, runs against the project in certain aspects of style and structure. A
great deal of it is spent in over-signposting the argument and in a general self-refer-
ential awkwardness, which some readers may find wasteful. The promise of a further
book on the subject seems to postpone some aspects of the study; it is as though there
is a better text beneath the one we are actually reading. But these hesitations are
perhaps an indication of the times – and Cheney’s scholarship will see him through
the uncertainties that can be glimpsed here as a kind of subtext. One thing that is
clear is that the intriguing posthumous vision of the poet-playwright revealed at the
end of the book shows that Cheney has certainly not squandered his life in studying
Shakespeare.
University of Gloucestershire Simon Barker
Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, Cambridge University

Press, 2005, pp. xiv + 363, £48.
In this groundbreaking study, Andrew Hadfield considers how republican ideas

underpin Shakespeare’s plays and non-dramatic poetry. His convincing argument
subverts assumptions concerning the political orthodoxy of Shakespearean writings.
Following the lead of scholars such as Patrick Collinson, who has argued that a con-
ciliar form of ‘monarchical republicanism’ tempered the authority of Elizabeth I,
Hadfield demonstrates how English intellectuals emulated republican ideals that per-
meate widely read historical and political treatises by Cicero, Tacitus, Livy, and other
classical thinkers who opposed the overthrow of the Roman republic. Hadfield
devotes his first chapter to a searching investigation of the currency of classical
sources of this kind in Elizabethan England. His consideration of the political ideas
of Sir Thomas Smith and George Buchanan comprises a particularly rich component
of the exploration of sixteenth-century English republicanism in the ensuing chapter.
The second part of this book then provides a searching investigation of how repub-
lican ideas suffuse Shakespeare’s oeuvre during the final years in the reign of Queen
Elizabeth. Not only did her failure to marry and produce an heir render certain the
extinction of the Tudor dynasty, which had been plagued by a chronic succession
crisis, it evoked the spectre of civil war that had wracked ancient Rome. It is no acci-
dent, therefore, that Shakespeeare composed the first tetralogy at the outset of his
dramatic career. Entitled ‘Shakespeare’s Pharsalia’ (p. 103), chapter 3 unfolds the
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importance of recurrent allusions to Julius Caesar and the Roman Civil War as part
of Hadfield’s compelling argument that this ancient conflict offered a set of topical
analogies that permeate Shakespeare’s dramatization of the Wars of the Roses.
Hadfield demonstrates how topical analogies to the potential for conflict inherent in
Queen Elizabeth’s failure to establish a secure line of succession ride piggyback upon
the Roman republican dimension of the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III. The
fourth chapter moves on to consider the representation of the origins of the Roman
republic in the Rape of Lucrece. Hadfield finds that Shakespeare portrays the ‘virtu-
ous chastity’ of Lucrece, a Roman matron who committed suicide in order to expiate
her dishonour by Tarquin, the Roman king who affords a profoundly anti-monar-
chical model, in sharp contrast to the ‘repellant virginity’ of England’s ageing queen
(p. 136). Turning away from English history to explicitly Roman plays chapter 5
addresses the dramatization of the destruction of the Roman republic in Titus
Andronicus and Julius Caesar. Although events in the first play take place prior to the
dissolution of the Roman empire, they evoke the ‘transformation from the republic
to the empire’ (p. 156). Focused upon the downfall of the Roman republic, the sec-
ond drama valorizes ideals associated with the eminent orator and political theorist
who plays only a minor role in this drama. Hadfield ably notes that ‘the absence of
Cicero’s voice . . . serves only to draw attention to his writings’ (p. 171). The ensuing
chapter explores republican overtones in Hamlet, whose radical elements include
dramatization of elective monarchical succession, tyrannicide theory, and assassina-
tion of not one, but two reigning monarchs. Entitled ‘After the republican moment’,
chapter 7 brings this splendid book to a conclusion with its consideration of republi-
can ideals in a variety of plays composed after the accession of James I. They include
Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and more.
Thoroughly committed to the goals espoused by Literature & History, to which
Hadfield has contributed two important essays, Shakespeare and Republicanism rep-
resents essential reading for readers of this journal. Literary scholars will profit from
his virtuoso consideration of Shakespeare’s republicanism at the same time that his-
torians will gain much from his bravura examination of political topicality during an
era of state censorship. Lest a few members of a generation that came of age through
reading Christopher Hill’s Milton and the English Revolution feel troubled by this
book’s pervasive reliance upon argument by analogy, Hadfield reminds us pace
Annabel Patterson that ‘We always need to read between the lines’ (p. 13).
One of the few errors noticeable in this book is the consistent misspelling of the
surname of Peter Blayney.
The Ohio State University John King
Dianne Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics during the English Civil War,
Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. vi + 300, £48.
Until relatively recently the prolific literature on the English Civil Wars was almost
entirely written by later men about the earlier men of the seventeenth century who
joined sides, fought in the battles and skirmishes, and passionately argued over the
issues at stake. Women’s histories and women’s writing are now, belatedly and thank-
fully, coming into focus. Despite the male-centredness of earlier treatments, however,
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‘masculinity’ in relation to the mid-seventeenth-century English upheavals is still a

relatively new topic and Purkiss’s book breaks much new ground in exploring it.
Based on her 1991 Oxford DPhil thesis, the original working title for this book was
‘Broken Men’, apposite in some obvious ways in the light of the mutilated, dismem-
bered, and injured bodies which piled up on Civil War battlefields. But this hardly
covered other aspects of her subject such as the masculinity-inducing early modern
methods of child-rearing and classics-based grammar school education. The dis-
carded provisional title gave rise in due course to a new one. But arguably the one
finally adopted is not quite right either since the coverage of the book extends way
beyond the period of actual fighting into the Republic of the 1650s and even up to
the Restoration of 1660.
The book parades a fascinating assembly of ‘stories’ and presents some telling
quotations from a wide range of sources. Purkiss examines the traumas, the pyschic
dramas, the signs and symbols, the threatened ‘semiotic chaos’ of the English Revolu-
tion, and the strains and fractures endured by individual and group masculine iden-
tity in these turbulent years. The book jacket’s cover illustration – The Parliament of
Women (1646) – draws attention to an obvious socio-political dimension of the sub-
ject, with the ostensibly secure man’s world being challenged by women’s hyperactive
enjoyment of new-found liberties. The essential male centredness of the Leveller
movement is rehearsed with its leaders always quickly appropriating for themselves
any independent activity on the part of their women folk. A case study of Charles I
depicts the king as an unconvicing male icon, hampered by his short stature and
speech defect, an ‘effeminate tyrant’ in the eyes of some of his most hostile critics, in
thrall first to a homosexual favourite, Buckingham, inherited from his father, and
then more lastingly to his domineering wife, the hated French Roman Catholic
princess Henrietta Maria. Only after his ‘martyrdom’ was a new, and much more
potent and usable, kind of kingly depiction made possible. Cromwell, by contrast,
comes across in these pages as a perversely excessive embodiment of masculinity (not
just on account of his reputation in some quarters as ‘the town bull of Ely’), too men-
acing a figure to co-exist comfortably at his level with household patriarchs lower
down the scale. The upsurge in popular literature in these years relating to monstrous
births – with women’s bodies discharging their malignant cargoes – is analysed. So is
the Civil War revival of the witch craze, with Matthew Hopkins presented here as a
man frantically holding his ground against the ungodly alliance between Satan and his
female agents. Marvell is drawn into the discussion at a number of points and Milton
is enlisted to provide almost a running commentary. ‘For Milton only strenuous
godly confinement can ensure that history, the state and masculinity can flourish as
they should’. The 1640s, as Purkiss views this decade, saw the man’s world, male
dominance, and masculinity all under threat. The Royalist banner which portrayed a
naked soldier, ready for action, with unsheathed sword and erect penis was but one
assertive response.
Ten years ago Purkiss’s book The Witch in History (1996) offered another blend of
psychohistory and literature; such an approach made eminent sense to a subject of
this kind. Valuable insights also abound in her new book and historians and literary
specialists will gain much from pondering its findings. But at times she surely presses
her speculations too far. A 1644 military incident in which soldiers threw a defence-
less woman into a river is converted into a symbolic cleansing of the unfortunate vic-
tim from the taint of childbirth and an assertively masculine cleansing of themselves.
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There are phallic symbols round almost every corner. And historians certainly will
occasionally cringe at Purkiss’s less than accessible style. (‘Milton’s metaphorisation
of writing as autochthonic reproduction marginalises the female role in reproduction,
constructing an image of auotelic, purely masculine texts rising unimpeded from the
earth’ [p. 188] is a particularly depressing example). Fortunately it is not all like this!
University of Winchester R. C. Richardson
Jennifer Panek, Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy, Cam-
bridge University Press, 2004, pp. x + 243, £45; Belinda Roberts Peters,
Marriage in Seventeenth-Century English Political Thought, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004, pp. ix + 243, £45.00.
Jennifer Panek’s Widows and Suitors in Early Modern Comedy and Belinda Roberts
Peters’ Marriage in Seventeenth-Century English Political Thought are testaments to
the continued vitality of the study of early modern marriage and the history of the
family; both books make strong contributions to this field. Panek’s book on widows
and suitors in early modern English comedy is notable for its nuanced readings of
individual plays, but even more so for its bold revision of the paradigm of the lusty
widow as a fantasy that enabled re-marriage rather than discouraged it. Peters focuses
less on a single cultural commonplace or ideal than on the many guises marriage took
in the period: the subtle and ever-changing interactions between household economy
and the wider polity.
Peters takes as her starting point the discourses surrounding the political union
between England and Scotland at the time of James I, articulating how the bond
between the King and his subjects was rhetorically constructed as indissoluble.
Because of the irreversible nature of marriage, it was subject to scrutiny before it was
consummated, a process akin to the kinds of cultural scrutiny imposed on the union
of England and Scotland before it was finalized. In this chapter, Peters considers the
nature of consent in reference to the union, including the possibility that Scotland
was entering the union under coercion in a manner similar to the rape of the Sabines,
a narrative in wide circulation through Thomas Heywood’s translation. The second
and third chapters investigate Charles I’s inability to speak about union in the same
language as James I, and the many ways in which the metaphor of a marriage between
the people and their King shifted during the Civil War period into a discourse about
the relationship between fathers and sons. Peters traces the way in which the marriage
contract changed meaning during the Interregnum and Restoration ‘from one that
confirmed the moral and consensual foundation of political government to one that
measured a relationship that defined what was not political’ (54). In the third part,
Peters engages with the literary texts, especially tragedy of the Jacobean era, to
explore the way in which tyranny was constructed, particularly around the histories
of the Roman Tarquins and the biblical King David. She outlines a cultural shift in
the seventeenth century from ‘rape’ to ‘rapine.’ The vision of a ‘tyrant’ changed –
through both royalist and republican writers – from a portrayal of a man who raped
and seduced another man’s wife to one who murdered and destroyed other men’s
property. Throughout this subtle, challenging and absorbing book, Peters draws on a
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wide variety of sources, most notably political tracts, domestic literature and drama.
The predominant methodology of the book is to investigate the ideas of a myriad of
individual thinkers and writers. Therefore, the book reads as intellectual history or
history of ideas rather than as cultural studies, but this focus on pure ideas allows the
reader to compare disparate thinkers like Milton, Winstanley, Hobbes, Astell, among
many others. Peters has offered subtle yet powerful analyses of changes in public dis-
course around marriage.
Panek’s book – equally well-researched and written – considers the early modern
stereotype of the lusty widow whose desires led her to seek re-marriage with a
younger man, a stereotype which many other scholars have viewed as punitive and
slanderous. Panek does a great deal to turn this critical consensus on its head, argu-
ing that ‘the lusty widow of early modern England appears to be less a manifestation
of male anxiety . . . than a notion which functions (imperfectly) to assuage a rather
different kind of male anxiety, centering around money, domestic government and
the remarried widow as wife’ (10). Panek’s book defends this argument with verve
and determination, all the while illuminating the many ways in which the compen-
satory cultural fantasy of the lusty widow functioned in the period. Each chapter con-
siders a different aspect of the fantasy. Starting with a consideration of the general
terrain of female remarriage in the period, she moves to a delineation of the male anx-
ieties about marrying a widow who might well be more financially established than
he was, and also more sexually experienced – a fear detailed in her fourth chapter on
male anxieties once the lusty widow became a wife. In her third chapter, Panek works
out the cultural dynamics of the poor suitor’s wishful fantasy that the widow’s lusti-
ness and sexual desire for him equalized the financial and social imbalances between
the couple – at least in the suitor’s imagination and in the drama of the time. Panek’s
lively final chapter on four Middletonian marriage plots show the playwright’s origi-
nality and daring in offering the remarriage fantasy to his audiences while robustly
debunking it. Panek’s focus on a single cultural fantasy is most notable for its focus
on cultural products like plays as representations of collective fantasies and anxieties
rather than representations of demographic realities. As she notes, ‘the use of social
history to explore dramatic representations of widows has frequently given rise to the
kind of literary criticism which seeks to compare widows to their real-life counter-
parts . . . but there are limits on the value of judging saleable dramatic fantasies by how
well they measure up to real-life situations’ (4). Panek’s work represents a corrective
to the easy mapping of social history on to literary texts, and is for this reason of wide
interest to anyone working on the intersection of literature and history.
Both Panek and Peters contribute much to our understanding of how marriage and
subjectivity interacted in the period, and show the powerful hold of collective fan-
tasies, ideals and rhetorics. Anyone researching marriage in the early modern period
should find these books rewarding reading.
Queens College CUNY Carrie Hintz
73
Mark S. Dawson, Gentility and the Comic Theatre of Late Stuart London,
Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. xvi + 300, £48.
Social historians come in for much criticism in this lively and argumentative book.
Some, like Penelope Corfield, are castigated for depicting gentility as an objective
reality, a fixed entity, a ‘class’, occasionally despite themselves and despite all that
has been written about social mobility and despite the well-documented presence of
a largely urban ‘pseudo-gentry’. But they are also called to account for their consis-
tent failure to engage seriously with ‘fiction’ in its various forms. As the editors
of this journal are all too painfully aware historians lag far behind their literary
colleagues in interdisciplinary commitment and practice. Dawson, a cultural historian
now based in the Australian National University in Canberra, breaks new ground
in the ways in which he explores the dividing lines between the genteel and non-
genteel of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This is a genuinely
interdisciplinary study, fully abreast of literary, dramatic and historical scholarship
and constantly sceptical and interrogatory in its use of sources. Gentility, for this
writer, is the very opposite of being a secure description of a fixed, complacently self
aware social group. Instead gentility is viewed here as ‘a set of cultural claims’, ‘a
socio-cultural process’, ‘a way of apprehending or seeing society’, ‘a socio-political
rhetoric’, and as ‘a cultural weapon with which to carve out power’. His texts –
mainly plays – are studied not as documentary depictions of their times, and not to
extract their intrinsic ‘meaning’ but to expose how they gave meaning ‘in an incessant
interchange of experience and interpretation’. Late seventeenth-century drama’s
animation of, and engagement and disputation with, its social themes forms the heart
of this book. Relatively little of the drama of this period is regularly performed today;
all but five of the 177 plays listed in the bibliography have gone into eclipse. Dawson
performs an extremely valuable service in casting his net widely to bring in the
unfamiliar, but often revealing, lesser-known dramatists to his discussion. Their sub-
ject matter and stock types – marriage, property accumulation, the exertion of
authority, gender relations, citizen cuckolds, fops (often ‘heirs in waiting’ in this
author’s view rather than would-be gentlemen), beauxs, whigs and tories all come
under scrutiny.
Much of the book, necessarily, is concerned with playwrights and actors and their
engagement with the multi-faceted subject of gentility but Dawson is equally at home
with discussion of the theatre itself as a liminoid social space and with the theatre-
going public. The combined capacity of late seventeenth-century London’s fashion-
able licensed theatres, he emphasises, was less than half that of Shakespeare’s Globe;
theatre audiences, accordingly, were socially ‘top-heavy’. They were visibly top-
heavy, too, since some of their number took their seats on the stage itself and the
auditorium remained lit throughout the performance. Audiences were there to be
seen. ‘A man must endeavour to look wholesome’, Lord Foppington famously
declared in Vanbrugh’s The Relapse (1697), ‘lest he make so nauseous a figure in the
Side box the ladies should be compelled to turn their eyes upon the play’. Audiences
no less than actors, therefore, were engaged in a constant performance; all were play-
ing out, impersonating, and disputing identities and claims for precedence. Since late
seventeenth-century theatre practice did not involve precise allocation of seating – the
ticket price gave access only to a designated area of the auditorium – contests, even
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duels, over the best vantage points were commonplace. Theatregoing, Dawson argues
convincingly, was a form of genteel self-fashioning and audiences consisting over-
whelmingly of gentry engaged and negotiated with the subject matter and social rit-
uals and interactions presented on the stage rather than passively witnessed them.
‘London’s playhouses’, he writes, ‘were places where the audience, by telling stories
to themselves about themselves, discovered certain “truths” concerning wider
society’.
In underlining these dialectical relationships between audiences, actors and play-
wrights and pinpointing the social functions of theatre Dawson prepares us for chap-
ter 10 of his book devoted to the controversy unleashed by the publication of Jeremy
Collier’s A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698).
Its title notwithstanding this heavyweight tome in fact ran to over three hundred
pages. Its mere bulk and the many responses it provoked from John Dennis, Thomas
Durfey, Elkanah Settle and others bear witness to the perceived social and moral
importance of the theatre at the time; it was too important a vehicle to trifle with or
misuse. All who study the drama of this period will gain from reading Dawson’s skil-
ful and thought-provoking exploration of the complex ways in which it was embed-
ded in its time and in the genteel audiences, at once assertive and nervous, for which
it catered. By extension the book suggests interesting possibilities of studying the
social dynamics of other groups in this and other periods.
University of Winchester R. C. Richardson
Karen Harvey, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in
English Erotic Culture, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 265, £45.
As is perhaps inevitable, the subtitle of Karen Harvey’s illuminating and well-written

book is a more accurate reflection of its contents than what comes before the
colon. Although Harvey does make some attempts to explore how eighteenth-
century erotica was read in its day, the heart of this book is not really an exploration
of readers’ responses (except perhaps her own) so much as a study of authors’ inten-
tions (where the stress is on the ‘presumed’ or ‘implied’ reader), since unsurprisingly
the evidence for how the material discussed here was read and interpreted is fairly
slight. Nevertheless, the first half of the title is accurate in that the erotic culture
studied here is largely book-culture (her primary sources are masses of erotic
pamphlets and books), but there is some clever analysis of paintings, prints and
engravings, and some discussion of the ‘erotic’ symbolism of Sir Francis Dashwood’s
garden in Buckinghamshire, which suggests that erotic visual culture deserves more
attention. But within this framework, this is a provocative and wide-ranging study
which successfully locates eighteenth-century erotica within broader currents of
thought, and which manages to place this (largely) unstudied subject matter firmly at
the centre of eighteenth-century cultural history. Whereas Roy Porter and Anthony
Fletcher have tended to portray the erotic as a subversive counterpoint to the ‘polite-
ness’ of the period, Harvey convincingly argues that erotica ought to be seen as a
child of its age, drawing on such quintessentially eighteenth-century topics as agri-
cultural improvement, colonialism, travel literature, the Enlightenment,
75
gardening and the public sphere. Eighteenth-century erotica, she argues, also
reflected the age’s concern with civility and sociability (it was sometimes perused in
a group); moreover it was not concerned with ‘reckless sexual frenzy’, but rather
was about self-control and restraint (through the use of metaphor, and by an
implicit distance between the reader and the subject matter). Further, she maintains,
erotica in this period was largely concerned with intellectual rather than physical
gratification.
Behind all this is Harvey’s insistence that there was a discrete and coherent genre
which could be labelled ‘erotica’ (which she views as a masculinist genre), and she
makes an interesting case that erotica was distinct from pornography on the one hand
(where physical gratification was the order of the day), and from romantic and ama-
tory literature on the other (which had a moral message). But this distinction is surely
still up for grabs; what is pornography to one person may be erotic to another, and
some of us might argue that there are passages even in Jane Austen which have an
erotic tone.
One of Harvey’s concerns is to use her material to examine and critique Tom
Laqueur’s fashionable thesis about the displacement in the eighteenth century of
the ‘one sex’ model by the ‘two sex’ model. Eighteenth-century understandings of
the body were more complex and varied than this, she argues, and she shows how
erotica could use, complicate, and challenge scientific and medical understanding.
She also makes the important point that eighteenth-century culture was not mono-
lithic, and that changes in one genre did not automatically imply or create changes
in others.
Her final chapter is a stimulating placing of erotica within eighteenth-century
understanding of the senses. Harvey’s conclusion that sight was viewed as the most
important sense, since it alone could guarantee that what was on offer was a hetero-
sexual relationship, is interesting, although one wonders how far this might be com-
promised through devices such as cross-dressing. But all in all, this is a rich and
thoughtful monograph which deserves to be as widely read as she suggests the subject
matter of her book was, and which adds a (suitably refined) frisson to our under-
standing of the lives and interests of a ‘polite and commercial people’ (or at least
polite and commercial men).
University of Manchester Jeremy Gregory
Laura M. Stevens, The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans,

and Colonial Sensibility, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, pp. 264,
$39.95.
In this eloquent and important book, Laura M. Stevens examines the origins of an
‘imperial rhetoric built on the claims of compassion’ (3) in Protestant missions to the
Indians in colonial British North America. Missionaries rallied support by describing
Indians as objects of pity, yet British pity only reflected and magnified the nobility of
British charity at the expense of any vision of those whom they made the object of
their good works. Stevens shows how missionaries and those who supported them
could not bear to see themselves without pity, placing them at the heart of the devel-
oping culture of sensibility in the eighteenth century. The study thus brings insights
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from the history of emotion to bear on postcolonial studies, demonstrating in a fresh

context that, as Stephen Greenblatt has argued, Western ‘power was creative as well
as destructive, but was scarcely ever wholly disinterested and benign.’
Stevens grounds her study in the huge body of Protestant missionary writings
created between the English Civil Wars and the beginning of the American Revolu-
tion. She draws on both public and private sources, concentrating on those of
the mainly Congregationalist New England Company, the Anglican Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, the Presbyterian Society of Scotland for
the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, and a smaller number of Quaker and Mora-
vian sources. These writings may be treated as a single body of work, however varied
the doctrines of those who produced them, because they all bore a similar rhetorical
strategy towards Indians. Each chapter examines a different genre or theme of mis-
sionary writings. Missionary biographies brought the compassionate British self into
focus at the expense of the Indians, who were used to create an affective response
among readers. Letters built a transatlantic community of shared feeling around the
plight of the ‘poor Indians,’ and sermons sought to transform compassion into action.
The language of prayer and evangelism became complicit with economic exploitation
as it equated spiritual transactions with financial ones. Missionaries exhorted readers
to consider prayer as labour and churches as orchards and factories.
This is a work of careful textual analysis that harbours many riches for historians.
Stevens’ analysis of the discourse of Christian charity will travel well into other fields
and periods of study, particularly those that address Christian missions to Africans
and African-Americans. One of the most valuable contributions of this study is its
careful attention to the broader context of eighteenth-century theology and philoso-
phy. Page after page builds a relentless case for the violence of language in the hands
of even the most well-meaning people. Pity remains a foundation of charitable
appeals to this day, and in a troubling epilogue, Stevens writes that to be a ‘middle-
class resident of a wealthy nation, whatever one’s religious position, is to be the off-
spring of missionaries.’ (202) The question remains as to whether British missions left
more than a legacy of destruction. Native offspring of missionaries continue to
struggle creatively with their identity as Native and Christian, as recent work by
James Treat and others has suggested. This is a challenging and finely crafted book,
one that will surely enrich scholarly conversation in early American history and
literature.
University of Arkansas Beth Barton Schweiger
Izabela Kalinowska, Between East and West. Polish and Russian Nineteenth-
Century Travel in the Orient, University of Rochester Press, 2004, pp. 200,
£50.
Edward Said’s Orientalism, published in 1978, has had an enormous influence on

ideas about cultural relativity and western approaches to the rest of the world. Much
has been written within the ‘Saidian’ framework. Said built his argument largely on
the work of French and British writers and only on their attitudes to the Near East.
He anticipated a Huntingtonian idea of ‘clash of civilisations’, of recognisable and
77
polarised cultural entities. In a later work, Humanism and Democratic Criticism he

modified the crudeness of the argument, but the impact of the earlier work endures.
The work under review adds to the steady demolition of the original-thesis.
Professor Kalinowska, Assistant Professor of Slavic Literatures at Stony Brook, has
shifted the focus of examining the literature of ‘orientalism’ by reviewing the work of
the Polish Adam Mickiewicz and the Russian Aleksandr Pushkin. There are chapters
on the Polish and Russian cultural backgrounds that place the writers and travellers
from those countries in a context that is very different from that of the writers Said
examined.
Both Russians and Poles asserted their Europeanness. But there were important dif-
ferences between the Polish and the Russian approaches to ‘the orient’ which in the
book is largely confined to Turkey and the Holy Land.
Late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Polish culture was struggling for an iden-
tity that distinguished it from its Slav brothers and sisters to the east. Poles were more
conscious of a western European world but able to empathise with a ‘victim’ culture.
Some Poles, who aspired to take an interest in the Islamic Middle East, found it easy
to have their experiences filtered through Russia, either by working there or travel-
ling heading for the Islamic world through there. But other Poles also often wandered
to Istanbul and felt at home there. One community fled to Istanbul after the failed
1830 Polish uprising and provided military support for the Ottoman Empire in the
Crimean War – against Russia. They were rewarded by Sultan Abulmecid with
property twenty miles or so to the east of Istanbul at a place known to this day as
Polonezkoy. Russians who settled in the Ottoman Empire were often also refugees
from Tsarist oppression. Poles never had any aspirations to conquer or wield politi-
cal influence in the Middle East.
Adam Mickiewicz took an interest in Arabic and Persian poetry and settled and
died in Constantinople. He saw the sonnet as originally derived from Arabic. Another
Pole, Aleksander Chodzko became an authority on the Turkish language and settled
in Paris. A guide to the Turkish language was used by French soldiers during their
alliance with the Turks in the Crimean War.
The situation was different with Russia. If we discount the emirates of Central Asia
that were absorbed into the Romanov Empire in the nineteenth century, Russia
looked to the Middle East across the Caucasus mountains. Their Other were Muslim
Daghistanis and Chechens, who have resisted for centuries – and resist to this day - a
Russian cultural hegemony. The most immediately accessible part of the world of ‘the
orient’ was the Crimea that had been an Ottoman province until the late eighteenth
century. Moreover from the time of Catherine the Great there were political aspira-
tions to the south. The Russian Church was the successor to Byzantium that had
surrendered Istanbul to the Turks in 1453. There were links between the world of
Orthodoxy and Russia. These links quickened in the nineteenth century with the
growth of pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Right up to the First World War Russians
aspired to some kind of hegemony, from special rights to conquest, in the Middle
East.
St Petersburg became a centre for oriental studies from the eighteenth century, and
Russian ‘orientalism’ may well have resembled more the Saidian paradigm. Lermen-
tov and Tolstoy wrote about Caucasian Muslims from their military experience. In
Russian travels to and scholarship on the Middle East it would be possible to see a
political context that was quite absent in the Polish experience.
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Reviews
Professor Kalinowska’s book emphasises the literary approach, but for the non-
specialist reader she raises more questions than she answers.
Frome, Somerset Peter Clark
Inga Bryden, Reinventing King Arthur. The Arthurian Legends in Victorian

Culture, Ashgate, 2005, pp. 182, £40.
In this thorough and perceptive survey of how the Victorians interpreted and
extended earlier versions of Arthurian legends Inga Bryden has no difficulty in estab-
lishing the significance and importance of her subject. Arthur’s status was, to use her
adjective, ‘paradoxical’. He was treated as a mythical and as an historical figure: in
the first Dictionary of National Biography he is called ‘the real or fabulous king of
Britain’. Moreover, he was associated with not one but a cluster of legends, among
the most pervasive of them that of the Holy Grail, and with not one but a range of
writers with conflicting as well as shared insights. There was never one Victorian
Arthur. Nor was Arthur always at the centre of what various critics have called ‘rein-
venting’ the English or the British past. There is no reference to Alfred in Dr Bryden’s
index, but there are two references to Prince Albert. Coming as Albert did from
outside English – or British – traditions, he left his own mark on ‘Victorian culture’.
Tennyson dedicated his Idylls of the King to him, claiming that Albert and Arthur
each represented ‘ideal manhood closed in real man’. Indeed, Arthur had returned as
Albert. There was certainly cultural centrality there. The last section of Dr Bryden’s
study is headed ‘Arthur and Camelot: Death and Return’. Not only for Tennyson was
there a Second Coming. Dr Bryden’s book provides a model of interdisciplinarity,
dealing as it does with literature, history, theology, anthropology and the visual arts,
identifying their interconnections. Yet partly for this reason, well sign-posted as it is,
her book is not easy to read. Indeed, it is a book to reflect on rather than to read.
Quite deliberately her seven chapters are divided thematically rather than chrono-
logically, an approach that places the emphasis on cultural debate rather than cultural
change. To strengthen perspective it is necessary for the reader to return to Dr
Bryden’s first chapter. This examines nineteenth-century ‘Arthurians’ and their
‘mythical inheritance’, going back to Gildas, who did not mention Arthur by name,
and to Nennius who at the close of the eighth century did. It might have been interest-
ing to have included also at least a few paragraphs on the twentieth century, indeed
on the twenty-first, when the Holy Grail now figures in a different context as does
Glastonbury. One of the many fascinating historical details in Dr Bryden’s survey is
that Henry II, having learnt from a Welsh bard that Arthur was possibly buried
between two pillars in Glastonbury Abbey, asked the monks to investigate. Only after
his death in 1189, however, were the supposed remains of Arthur and Guenovare put
on show. Dr Bryden’s last references in time are to the First World War of the
twentieth century. She notes that Wilfred Owen, a very different kind of poet from
Tennyson, recognised the horror of Tennyson’s prediction, ‘How unto Avalon, in
agony Kings passed in the dark barge, which Merlin dreamed’.
Lewes, Sussex Asa Briggs
79
Alan Robinson, Imagining London, 1770–1900, Palgrave, 2004, pp. xix +

291, £55.
Manchester apart, London is one of the most-observed cities of the nineteenth cen-
tury. The appearance of this book might prompt the reviewer to ask whether we need
another study of London when so many interesting provincial places have been
neglected. Moreover, the view of London offered here is a restricted one, focused
upon the imaginings of what the author calls the ‘middling sort’: in effect, it is the
view from a few élite novelists (Dickens, Trollope, James) and painters (Madox
Brown, Monet, Pissaro, Whistler, Sickert and others). On the other hand Robinson
gives us an excellent close reading of a number of written and visual texts set within
a historical framework that emphasises the development of the city’s commercial
economy from the late-eighteenth century and, more especially, the gendered nature
of city life. Contrary to some feminist historians Robinson reclaims the notion of
‘separate spheres’ and re-asserts the constraints seen to operate upon women, espe-
cially in working-class society. His rich documentation, combined with depth of
analysis, produces an immensely satisfying book. It is a measure of the inter-textual
erudition at work that, when citing the famous passage from the Communist Mani-
festo on the bourgeoisie, the author reminds us that Samuel Moore’s 1880s transla-
tion of it into English resonates with a ‘Carlylean idiom’ (p. 61).
Another book on London, then, is in this case perfectly justified. Robinson, a stu-
dent of both art and literature, moves us through a range of cultural texts with great
assurance. He is particularly impressive on the painters, whose oeuvre has been less
well served by historians than has that of the novelists. In two chapters he looks at
the development of an urban-based art from the 1850s onwards, reminding us that
Londoners were ‘only half-hearted modernists’ (p. 125) and that those who sought to
depict the city, its commercial modernity, and the class and gender tensions within it,
were themselves pulled in different directions: as artists towards the plight of the
masses, as in Luke Fildes’s disturbing Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward,
exhibited in 1874 with a rail around it and a policeman to control the crowd, but as
entrepreneurs towards the money market and what the art-buying public was deemed
to want. The career of Atkinson Grimshaw is the exemplar of the artist of fluctuating
style, his canvases serving ‘as a barometer of popular taste’ (p. 151). Robinson’s pur-
pose in these chapters is in part to examine London’s awkward relationship with
French Impressionism. Aside from visiting Frenchmen like Monet and Pissaro the
technique had no indigenous practitioner until Walter Sickert applied it in his studies
of the London music hall in the closing years of the century. In its subversion of con-
ventional subject matter and technique Impressionism had sparked a frisson in the
collective mind of the middling sort, fusing with frightening images of the ‘residuum’
and the ‘abyss’. In the hands of Sickert ‘realist’ sense perception was abandoned for
subjectivity, and London’s ‘half-hearted modernists’ were safely brought into contact
with a more fully-fledged version.
De Montfort University, Leicester Jeffrey Hill
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R. Dellamora, Friendship’s Bonds. Democracy and the Novel in Victorian

England, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, pp. 252, illustrated,
$47.50.
The author of this curious but fascinating book focuses on what to many of
his readers will be unfamiliar but what to him are converging themes. He begins
with an image – the parting of Jonathan and David in the painting, c.1895, by John
Singer Sargent, who is described at some length later in the book. In the words of
Dellamora, the painting combines ‘three elements that converge’ in his six chapters,
plus coda, which follow – ‘Jewish national and religious sentiment’ (note the order);
‘Anglo-Saxon idealization of Dorianism, the institution of Spartan military ped-
erasty’; and ‘the tendency in emergent male homosexual culture to find the basis of
citizenship in male friendship rather than in blood connection’. For him all these
‘forms of otherness’ are related to the gradual development of political democracy.
So, too, are changing male attitudes towards women, particularly husbands to
spouses. Dellamora, who says less about the attitudes of women to women, draws on
a wide range of sources, but leaves out many that are essential to adequate interpre-
tations of the role of the novel in Victorian England. Instead he relies heavily on a
number of recent books that share his approach. For me the weakest of his chapters
are the first on Oliver Twist, where he discusses Cruikshank and his images as much
as Dickens and his serialised text, and the fourth on ‘the lesser holocausts of William
Gladstone and Anthony Trollope’. There the whole of Dellamora’a argument pivots
on two texts, both of which can be interpreted in quite different ways from his –
Gladstone’s Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East and Trollope’s The Prime
Minister. The strongest – and to me most interesting – chapters deal with Disraeli and
George Eliot, perhaps because both Disraeli and Eliot were aware of the convergence
of the themes that Dellamora connects. Again, however, concentration on single texts
– Tancred and Daniel Deronda, the latter published in 1876 the same year as The
Prime Minister – has its dangers. The chapters on the last decades of the nineteenth
century about which Dellamora has already written much, raise some of the most
important points concerning his notion of ‘convergence’. As he rightly points out,
between 1876 and 1890, the date of publication of Henry James’s The Tragic Muse,
‘a number of changes occurred that forecast a much different play of relations
between politics, desire [one of Dellamora’s key concepts] and aesthetics’. (p. 152).
Dellamora identifies what to historians of different persuasions will be
crucial links. Within ‘friendship writing’, which he carefully explores from the
ancient Greeks onwards, ‘idealized friendship provides the basis for active citizen-
ship’ (p. 191). Oscar Wilde through his own experiences came to believe that ‘a “gov-
ernment of the best” neither exists nor is possible even as an ideal projection in
present-day democracy’. Like the other Wilde observations and conclusions reported
by Dellamora this is an arresting statement. Yet in the 1890s British democracy was
being forged – and its forging was far from finished in 1895 when Wilde’s An Ideal
Husband was first performed. How it was forged can only be explained convincingly
by incorporating into the analysis themes that do not figure in Dellamora’s narrative.
Lewes, Sussex Asa Briggs
81
Judy Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb. Domestic Identities, Class, Feminin-
ity and Modernity, Berg, 2004, pp. ix + 197, £15.99 pb.
In this examination of the relationship between domesticity and modernity, Judy

Giles continues her analysis of the gendering of identity in the first half of the
twentieth century. In her introduction Giles compares a photograph of herself with
her mother and sister taken in 1950 with Mira’s representation of domesticity in The
Women’s Room, twenty years later. Mira and Giles’ mother are drawn into the
domestic imagery of the American Dream on one side of the Atlantic and the image
of the happy housewife on the other. They struggle with the tensions produced at a
historically specific moment between expectations of domesticity and educational
achievement. Recent films such as ‘Mona Lisa Smile’ and the remake of ‘Stepford
Wives’ have also reflected the current revival of interest in the formation of female
identity at this time, suggesting an increased awareness of the significance of gender
in our understanding of the history of the twentieth century. Andrew Bingham’s
forthcoming book, Gender, Modernity and the Popular Press in Interwar Britain, fur-
ther demonstrates academic interest in the topic.
In this persuasively argued book Giles discusses the highly gendered nature of the
concept of modernity which has, to date, marginalized the domestic space and
women’s traditional role as ‘homemakers’. Claire Langhamer has problematised
ungendered definitions of leisure and Giles discusses the way that modernity, in the
form of technological, sociological and economic change, has impacted on the man-
ner in which women not only manage their lives but also form their identities. The
notion of agency is central to Giles’ argument and the concept of gender is recognised
as central to the formation of our understanding of the meaning and implications of
modernity.
The book is divided into four chapters: a discussion of the relationship of the sub-
urb, usually considered to be the antithesis of modernity, to domesticity and identity;
an in-depth consideration of the changes in the availability and provision of domes-
tic help during this period and the place of consumption in the creation of identity.
In the final chapter Giles looks at the legacy of modernity in the proliferation of the
gender dichotomy which still represents ‘home’ as something to be left, something
which still limits the expression of women’s independence and the suburb as the
refuge of the flight from the modern.
The familiar names of E.M. Delafield, Virginia Woolf and Molly Hughes are
juxtaposed with a detailed analysis of Winifred Fremlin’s Seven Chars of Chelsea
(1940). This offered an insider’s view of the world of domestic help and enables Giles
to discuss the complex relationship between class and gender in the making of moder-
nity. Although The Parlour and the Suburb is primarily concerned with British cul-
ture, it concludes with a consideration of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique. In
critiquing the book, despite its acknowledged influence on her own life, Giles high-
lights the way that feminists have fallen into the male model of modernity by prolif-
erating the notion that the domestic and the suburb are per se sites of oppression.
University of Winchester Stephanie Spencer
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Reviews
Joseph Wiesenfarth (ed.), History and Representation in Ford Madox Ford’s

Writings, International Ford Madox Ford Studies Volume 3, Rodopi, 2004,
pp. xi + 241, £34 pb; Joseph Wiesenfarth, Ford Madox Ford and the Regi-
ment of Women: Violet Hunt, Jean Rhys, Stella Bowen, Janice Biala, Univer-
sity of Wisconsin Press, 2005, 30 plates, pp. xvi + 217, $34.95.
These two timely volumes, one edited and the other authored by Joseph Wiesenfarth,
are testament to the vibrancy of current work on Ford Madox Ford, and to Wiesen-
farth’s particular contribution in this area. As several of those included in the essay
collection remind us, Ford expressed the view that ‘History and Fiction are one’, and
believed that ‘impressions’ should take precedence over ‘facts’. Whilst such state-
ments could appear to anticipate postmodern attitudes, Max Saunders, in his essay
‘Critical Biography: Rhetoric, Tone and Autobiography in Ford’s Critical Essays’,
suggests that Ford’s attitude echoes not the relativism of postmodernity but the
modernist view of art as able to ‘overcome human partiality’ (p. 175). For Andrzej
Gasiorek, considering Ford’s relationship to post-First World War literary culture, if
Ford anticipates postmodernism, he does so in his recognition of the changed status
of Britain and indeed Europe in the movement towards post-imperialism. In tackling
Ford’s relationship to history, the essays collected here take a range of approaches:
some, like Gasiorek’s, assess Ford’s attempts to capture historical events as they pass
and as he experiences them; others, like Saunders, consider Ford’s place within and
his attitudes towards literary history; and there are also case studies of Ford’s
attempts to depict particular historical events across a range of genres.
Unsurprisingly, the First World War is a key focal point here, with Jonathan
Boutler considering No Enemy from the perspective of trauma theory, and Vita
Fortunati placing Parade’s End alongside Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the
Western Front and Ernest Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms. There are also three
creative and interesting essays on The Fifth Queen, Ford’s novel about the life of
Katherine Howard. This provides a useful focus for the assessment of Ford’s attitudes
towards the relationship between history and literature. Jason Harding’s essay, ‘The
Swan Song of Historical Romance: The Fifth Queen Trilogy’, examines the range of
source material that fed into Ford’s novel and gives a lucid and illuminating analysis
of Ford’s use of pictorial effects. This essay is complimented by Angus Wrenn’s
‘Henry, Hueffer, Holbein, History and Representation’, which considers Holbein’s
influence on both Ford and Henry James, and by Anne Marie Flanagan’s examina-
tion of the depiction of Lady Mary in the novel.
This collection, which succeeds Ford Madox Ford: A Reappraisal and Ford Madox
Ford’s Modernity in the series International Ford Madox Ford Studies, has its roots
in a conference held at the University of Madison-Wisconsin, and suffers from some
of the contributions being insufficiently worked up for publication. A number of the
authors allow preamble to take precedence over argument, perhaps as a consequence
of the relatively short space given to each. But this is nevertheless a valuable and
thought-provoking volume.
The relationship between life and work, history and representation, is also key
to Wiesenfarth’s Ford Madox Ford and the Regiment of Women. Wiesenfarth sets
out to identify the traces of Ford’s influence in the works – either verbal or visual –
of Violet Hunt, Jean Rhys, Stella Bowen and Janice Biala. This is not just a case of
83
showing how Hunt and Rhys attempted to revenge themselves on Ford by depicting
him unfavourably in their literary works; his influence on them, and indeed their
influence on him, could run deeper, and Wiesenfarth also acknowledges that, quite
aside from depicting a version of real events any novel will have its own relationship
to literary history. Thus although Ford is the raison d’être for this study, and, indeed,
for many of the works discussed within it, Wiesenfarth is concerned to place these
women and their artistic productions in wider contexts. For example, in his discus-
sion of the paintings of Stella Bowen, Ford’s partner for most of the 1920s, and
appointed Official War Artist by the Australian government in 1943, Wiesenfarth
argues for Ford’s influence in her development of the decorative style, but also cites
her own art criticism to identify a range of other influences on her work. He draws
convincing comparisons between her Second World War group portraits of men in
uniform, the subjects individuated by the detail of their faces, and Ford’s First World
War poems, ‘Regimental Records’, where detail is also all important. (The discussion
of Bowen is facilitated by the beautiful reproductions of more than twenty of her
paintings that illustrate this book.) As Wiesenfarth reminds us, Ford’s memoirs focus
on his ‘public’ rather than ‘private’ life; the extent to which this was an artificial divi-
sion is reinforced by one of Bowen’s portraits of him from the early 1920s. We see
the familiar face of the author, mouth slightly agape, but, as Wisenfarth shows, the
crumpled material of his trousers conceals an inverted, ghostly image: a face strik-
ingly like that of Jean Rhys, refusing Ford’s attempts to shake her off.
University of Leicester Victoria Stewart
Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham (eds), New Woman Hybridities: Fem-
ininity, feminism and international consumer culture, 1880–1930, (Rout-
ledge Transatlantic Perspectives on American Literature), Routledge, 2004,
pp. xv + 279, £63.
New Woman Hybridities addresses the creation of the New Woman through a frame-
work usually employed by post-colonial theorists. Representations of women were
significant in the construction of new identities formed as a result of diaspora and
migration and a growing consumer culture. The popular press, often itself composed
of a hybridity of voices, both promoted and condemned the increasingly economi-
cally and socially independent generation of young women across the globe.
In a comprehensive introduction the editors highlight the transnational nature of
the ideas which shaped the ‘New Woman’ in the United States, Canada, England,
Wales, Ireland, Germany, Hungary and Japan. The four sections; ‘Hybridities’;
‘Through the (periodical) looking glass’; ‘Communities of women’; and ‘Race and the
New Woman’ work through definitions of hybridity using case studies which empha-
sise the contextual specificity of the New Woman phenomenon.
Kirsti Bohata notes that the very notion of a ‘hybrid’ assumes that a cultural
authenticity already exists in her discussion of Bertha Thomas’s writing which sat
uneasily between English and Welsh cultures. Homi Bhabha’s identification of the ‘in
between spaces’ which ‘carry the burden of meaning’ (18) is used as a framework to
this chapter which provides an excellent beginning to the individual contributions.
84
Reviews
Louise Ryan and Maryann Valiulis consider the later arrival of the ‘flapper’ in Irish
Society and the role that the provincial and ecclesiastical press played in her repre-
sentation. The individual chapters are brief but the diversity of topics does enable us
to identify common trends. The contributions by Laurel Brake, Angelique Richard-
son and Jill Bergman revisit the suffrage debates and the eugenics movement in
Britain and America. Each author in the collection rightly notes the significance of
context and identifies the way in which women’s role was frequently discussed in
relation to national identity. There was as much concern about the effect that New
Women would have on the transmission of traditional culture as on any possible
domestic disruption. The chapters on the Hungarian experience by Nora Sellei and
Judit Acsady offer particular insights into this aspect of the debate.
One of the most interesting themes of the book is the uneasy relationship between
newly emergent feminist movements and the New Woman. She was not simply a rep-
resentation of a monolithic international feminism – differences in national identity
and culture were integral to the development of feminisms and concepts of hybridity
offer insights into the relationship between gender and nation. This is particularly
clear in the sex debates which, as Muta Kazue notes, resulted in campaigns for vir-
ginity in Japan in contrast to demands for free love more usually associated with
‘New’ women.
Angelika Kohler discusses the familiar visual representation of the New Woman as
emblematic of modernity in the cartoons of Charles Dana Gibson. These are com-
pared to contemporary American cartoons which highlighted the more problematic
side of the independent Gibson Girl. This chapter together with Trina Robbins’
contribution on Nell Brinkley’s drawings of more active girls include a variety of
illustrations which demonstrate the changing representations of womanhood. Illus-
trations in Ingrid Sharp’s chapter on women in the Weimar press also reflect the
ambivalence which greeted new ideas of femininity and motherhood.
Women themselves were clearly active participants in the construction of the New
Woman. The syndication of articles by men and women across continents is discussed
in several chapters especially one by Françoise LeJeune on the Daughters of the
Empire of British Columbia, a community which was influenced by both British and
American press. Hilary Fawcett examines how actresses, fashion designers and fiction
writers contributed to the construction of ‘exotic sensbilities and new horizons of
bodily pleasures’. Her conclusion is thought provoking as she suggests that the period
up to the 1920s marked the final moment before food became a site of ‘fear and anx-
iety’ for women rather than an ‘ultimate consuming passion’ (156).
This book utilises a wide range of sources in the form of novels, illustrations and
popular journalism to explore the significance and the ramifications of the emergence
of the elusive ‘New Woman’. It provides useful examples of how theories of ‘hybrid-
ity’ may be employed by interdisciplinary scholars by reworking some familiar
ground and re-writing some lesser-known individuals or groups into the frame of
reference.
University of Winchester Stephanie Spencer
85
Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes, Teaching the Representation of the

Holocaust, New York, Modern Languages Association of America, 2004,
pp. viii + 509, $22 pb.
There is much in this fascinating collection that will be of use to both those embark-
ing on teaching ‘Holocaust studies’ for the first time, more experienced practitioners,
and indeed those researching and shaping the discipline. The text is aimed very much
at the former – showing, through a variety of essays, the pitfalls associated with teach-
ing a subject that is perhaps increasingly adopted thoughtlessly, particularly as a way
into highlighting the dangers of illiberalism. In doing this, the editors have performed
a great service, as their text will challenge the educators that engage with it to avoid
some of the banal simplicities of a Holocaust education where the Shoah is seen as the
antithesis of the modern, integrated, west. Geoffrey Hartman’s essay on using Holo-
caust testimonies in the classroom, for example, demands that educators offer more
than simply a programme in Holocaust studies which salves the conscience, while
avoiding the alternative pitfall that declares despair the only response to the destruc-
tion of Europe’s Jews. Jared Stark’s consideration of Holocaust diaries and memorial
books is equally challenging, requiring that such sources be used to break down some
of the easy meta-narratives which have predominated. Other essays reflect on speci-
fic texts often used to engage with the Shoah in the classroom, such as Primo Levi’s
If this is a man, Lanzmann’s Shoah and the memoirs of Ruth Kluger and Charlotte
Delbo.
It is where the modes of transmission involved in Holocaust education are consid-
ered, however, that this text is at its most challenging. Although primarily concerned
with Holocaust representation, Doris Bergen’s essay on the importance of history in
grounding Holocaust education is a case in point. Bergen’s assertion of the primacy
of history is something of a rejoinder to those interested only in the representation of
the Shoah. But as Bergen admits, historians too have to confront that theirs is yet
another of these modes of transmission and representation – important but not all-
important. Alan Rosen’s reflections on the role of language in the education and
representation of the Holocaust are equally stimulating. Rosen points to the irony
that English dominates much of both representation and education, and yet it is a
language that was marginal to the multilingual universe of the Shoah. But as Rosen
points out, this is not a reason for rejecting English – after all which language is it that
can ‘know’ the Holocaust best? It is nonetheless refreshing to find a scholar engaging
with the actual languages and vocabularies of knowing, rather than simply proclaim-
ing the unknowability of the concentration camp universe – which is ultimately just
easy rhetoric.
Overall this volume demands that the reader see the degree to which the Holocaust
lies at the very cross roads of interdisciplinarity. The test case for moral , philosoph-
ical debates regarding the limits of representability and aesthetics; the ground over
which arguments regarding the constructed or received nature of historical know-
ledge will be fought. To reiterate: anyone embarking on Holocaust education will be
well served by this book, and for others more familiar with the discipline there is
much here to provoke thought.
University of Winchester Tom Lawson
86
Reviews
M. Cox (ed.), E.H. Carr: a critical appraisal, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004,

pp. xxii + 352, £68, £19.99 pb.
A negative view of Carr’s career could characterise it as follows. In the name of

‘realism’ in international relations, he championed appeasement in the ’thirties only
to have this amoral policy exposed as an unrealistic failure. Then, also in a spirit of
realism, he was sympathetic to the Soviet Union, failing to see its weaknesses. And
What is History?, though a best-seller, is over-rated. Reviewing Carr’s interpretations
of the Soviet Union, even Cox feels obliged to ask, ‘But does any of this really
matter any longer?’ However, he decides that it does, and the fact that this paperback
edition (hardback in 2000) has now appeared indicates continuing interest in Carr’s
life and works. ‘Critical appraisal’ is a fair summary of the balanced approach of most
contributors who eschew both hagiography and the vilification that Carr’s son refers
to in a dignified ‘Foreword.’
The book is divided into ‘Life and Times’, ‘The Russian Question’, ‘International
Relations’ and ‘What is History?’ Additionally, we have Carr’s brief autobiography,
Cox’s ‘Introduction’, notes on the contributors, a chronology of Carr’s life and work
1892–1982, and a note about the Carr papers for those interested in further research.
In this the editorial work is impeccable, but more editing of the other contributions
would have avoided a lot of repetition.
Most contributors know their subject well, some having personal or institutional
connections with Carr. Jonathan Haslam, his biographer, contributes to the ‘Life and
Times’ section; as does Charles Jones, who has also written about Carr, and here
looks at Carr at The Times. The International Politics department at Aberystwyth,
Carr’s first academic posting, is well-represented by Cox, Tim Dunne, Randall
Germain, Andrew Linklater (who holds Carr’s old Chair) and Brian Porter. R.W.
Davies, co-author with Carr of Foundations of a Planned Economy, deals with the
complexity of Carr’s views of the Soviet Union before the War. Stephen White looks
at the Soviet view of Carr – unsurprisingly he was seen as a ‘bourgeois’ historian.
Hillel Ticktin is the most critical of Carr’s interpretations of Soviet history: ‘He did
not comprehend Marxism, nor the Russian Revolution, nor the nature of the epoch
but at least he struggled to understand all three.’
The key issue for the International Relations specialists, Dunne, Linklater, Peter
Wilson, Paul Rich and Fred Halliday, is Carr’s supposed ‘realism’ and its contribu-
tion to the study of International Relations. This leads on quite naturally to the nature
of history. Despite What is History? being his best-known book, this section is the
shortest. Germain and Anders Stephanson are careful to locate What is History? in
the context of Carr’s other work; indeed Stephanson concentrates most on The New
Society. In contrast, Keith Jenkins, in a self-regarding piece, concentrates on What is
History? but is unable to forgive Carr for not being a postmodernist, affording us
the amusing spectacle of a postmodernist like Jenkins complaining that Carr thought
that he was exempt from his own relativism. In general, however, this is a book
for those, who, like Carr himself, want to listen to the buzzing of the bees in an
historian’s bonnet.
Southport, Lancs. Christopher Parker
87
Richard Lehan, Realism and Naturalism: The Novel in an Age of Transition,

University of Wisconsin Press, 2005, pp. xxxiv + 312, $60.
In this wide-ranging study, Richard Lehan sets out to consider realism and naturalism
as international literary movements that, although displaced by modernism in the
1920s, continued to be a discernible presence until at least the 1950s. Indeed, the
cover-blurb promises coverage of authors including Honoré de Balzac, Emile Zola,
Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Joyce Carol Oates and Don DeLillo. In fact, it is the
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers who are the prime concern of the
book, and those interested in realism and naturalism’s contemporary manifestations
will be disappointed to find only about a page and a half on Oates and a mere half-a-
dozen lines on DeLillo. In Lehan’s analysis, the development of realism and natural-
ism as literary forms can be mapped on to the emergence of modern city life, and, as
in his earlier study The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History
(1998), literature is seen as both reflecting and interrogating the upheavals attendant
on new ways of living.
The book is organised, roughly speaking, chronologically, with the movement
from realism to naturalism being mapped against contemporary developments in
philosophy and science, but Lehan is not shy of the broad-sweep approach. The sec-
ond chapter, ‘Realism as a Narrative Mode’, takes us from Cervantes to Henry James
in the space of thirty pages, via Wordsworth, Defoe, Fielding, Dickens, George Eliot,
Eugène Sue, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Mikhail
Sholokhov, Mark Twain and William Dean Howells. What is notable here, and else-
where in the book, is a focus on content over and above matters of form, style or
voice. This is not to deny that it is possible to identify lines of development and sim-
ilarities between these writers; but it seems to be forcing the issue to consider Gogol’s
stories ‘The Nose’ and ‘The Overcoat’ as exemplifying the difficulties of life in the
increasingly bureaucratised city without acknowledging their grotesque and folkloric
aspects and their complex use of narrative voice, apparent even in translation. Lehan
elsewhere includes brief discussions of subgenres such as detective fiction and the
adventure story, but perhaps downplays the extent to which stylistic issues, such as
attempts to transcribe demotic speech patterns, are a larger part of what links such
works to the realist continuum.
Norris, Dreiser and Sinclair are subject to more sustained discussion in the fourth
chapter, ‘A Field of Force: The Biological Model’, and here there are some useful
observations on the influence of Balzac and Zola on the American naturalist writers.
This does reinforce the sense, however, that what is perhaps lacking in the book as a
whole is a sense of the wider literary culture that sustained or, for example, in the
case of Gissing, frustrated these writers. This is perhaps one of the disadvantages of
attempting to identify patterns that cut across national boundaries. Literary inter-
ventions are seen as relating to the historical context and to each other, but there is
little sense of, for instance, contemporary reactions to these authors in their own or
in other cultures at their time of publication or translation. Situated somewhere
between literary history and genre study, this book is not completely satisfactory in
either.
University of Leicester Victoria Stewart
88
Reviews
H. Gustav Klaus and Stephen Knight (eds), ‘To Hell with Culture’: Anar-
chism and Twentieth-Century British Literature, University of Wales Press,
2005, pp. 214, £40.
‘To Hell with Culture’ fills a real gap and is a deeply engaging work that offers a lucid
explanation of the impact of the anarchist movement on British literature of the past
century. It is not possible, however, to get far into this book before realizing the huge
task Klaus and Knight had set before them as they attempted to determine the best
audience for their work. To what extent would they need to introduce readers to
theories of anarchism? How much would they need to say about the historical con-
text, both of twentieth-century literature and of the flowering of anarchism in the
nineteenth century? How much information about the lives of the individual authors
would be essential to an understanding of the literary texts? For the editors of this
book these questions must have posed major challenges. To make matters worse – as
Valentine Cunningham explains in his essay for this collection – what is most cer-
tainly revealed in a study of English anarchism is ‘its utter messiness: its profound
looseness, both political and personal’. In the face of all these challenges, Klaus and
Knight have woven together essays that appeal to a broad audience. The book offers
astute lessons for those unfamiliar with anarchist literature, yet these lessons surely
also prove fresh and insightful to readers who are well-versed in the theoretical and
historical contexts.
Although the many brief lectures on the history of anarchism are both instructive
and enjoyable, in reading the book from cover to cover I found myself appreciating
most the comprehensive ideas that emerged, such as the connection between chaos
and order, or the relationship between abuses of authority and abuses of the English
language. In addition, in reading about the intricate lives of the writers associated
with anarchism, what comes through is a theme that hearkens back through Yeats to
Shelley to Milton: the poet’s or novelist’s hesitancy to leave the relative safety of pen
and paper and engage in direct political action. Finally, reading these essays left this
reviewer pondering how the unstable nature of anarchism relates to changes in art of
the modern period, the religious and economic ramifications of anarchism, and even
the connection between anarchism and sexuality. Such range in ideas parallels the
range of genres influenced by anarchism, for not only was the classic novel affected,
but also detective fiction, film, and drama. In short, the intellectual scope of ‘To Hell
with Culture’ is truly impressive.
Klaus and Knight’s introduction illuminates the overarching theme of the book
which is the relationship between life and culture within an anarchist frame of refer-
ence. Too often culture is seen as divorced from life, part of a higher realm that is to
be appreciated or studied, but not lived. Critical to anarchist thinking is the integra-
tion of thought and action, and by extension, of art and life. Therefore, just as litera-
ture mattered to the anarchist, ideally as a means of shaping the world, so anarchism
should matter to the student of literature, for its impact on twentieth-century writing
is felt in both pronounced and subtle ways. Several chapters follow the lead set by the
editors in their introduction, especially those that offer a solid understanding of
the connection between anarchism and aesthetics. John Rignall’s essay on Joseph
Conrad, for example, draws parallels between that writer’s experience of anarchism
in life and expression of it in The Secret Agent. Also, as William Malcolm offers an
89
excellent analysis of anarchism in the writing of James Leslie Mitchell in ‘Art for Poli-
tics’ Sake’, he also presents a fascinating argument about the artistic ramifications of
anarchist thinking. Likewise, Paul Gibbard’s chapter on Herbert Read argues for an
‘anarchist aesthetic’ through which most of the literature can be understood, but also
through which social change can be effected. As anarchist principles shape art, Gib-
bard argues, art then shapes society.
Any credible study of British anarchism, however, must admit that the movement
was largely a masculine one. There was little room for women, who tended to hover
around the margins, never quite part of the inner circle. ‘To Hell with Culture’ makes
such an admission yet insists on bringing women activists and writers on to centre
stage. In doing so several of the contributors explore a personality central to anar-
chism, Emma Goldman, whose impact on British literature cannot be denied. Kath-
leen Bell’s essay on the influence of Goldman on Ethel Mannin is stunning in its
portrayal of the personalities involved and, frankly, Bell’s analysis of the literature is
not nearly as engaging as her discussion of Mannin’s relationship with Goldman. As
Bell portrays Goldman as both a dynamic and deeply complex woman, she admits
that Goldman stood out as a controversial figure even among anarchists, and parti-
cularly among women. Clearly Goldman presented a problem for Mannin, who
could not quite handle this author’s brand of feminism, or the discrepancies between
Goldman’s personal life and her personal beliefs. Yet like Mannin – this book teaches
us – we cannot help but admire Goldman’s passion and admit to the key role she
played in the development of anarchist thought in Europe.
Certainly these essays together present a thorough discussion of the connection
between anarchism and British literature of the past century. Yet the contributors
offer far more than theory, for they obviously care about the players in this story: the
authors behind the novels, the activists behind the ideas. The stories they tell paint a
vivid picture of the personalities involved – the ardent, idealistic, tormented souls
who fought to make anarchism a reality. Surely readers will value the depth of know-
ledge contained in this collection of essays yet they will also remember the striking
description of the 1933 Foyle’s Literary Luncheon, at which Emma Goldman pre-
sented the main address, Rebecca West spoke, and Paul Robeson sang. Likewise
readers will not forget the account of the feverish tension that arose at a poetry read-
ing at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, where anarchist poets openly attacked T.S.
Eliot, who was himself in attendance. The players in this story are rife with passion,
and ‘To Hell with Culture’ draws out both the best and the worst that this passion
evoked. The richness of this collection, therefore, comes from the portrayal of a com-
munity of writers, thinkers, and activists whose lives intersected as they worked
together for a common dream, loosely constructed though it was. It is the personali-
ties behind the theories that make these essays come alive – an added bonus, surely,
making this book not just an academic endeavour but a life experience.
Westminster College, Missouri Carolyn Perry
90
Reviews
Stephanie Spencer, Gender, Work and Education in Britain in the 1950s,

Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. xii + 253, £55.00.
This book focuses on girls making employment choices in 1950s England, confirm-
ing the heavily gendered nature of career choice and the predominantly middle-class
construction of femininity. A number of key themes permeate the analysis, including
autonomy, independence, and citizenship. The context is the 1944 Education Act, an
increased demand for female participation in the workforce, and the development of
the welfare state. The author questions the view of the 1950s as a decade of consen-
sus on gender roles. Adopting a feminist philosophical framework, she examines the
relation between individual agency and external forces, clearly demonstrating a two-
way interaction. In particular, she presents a more nuanced view of women and the
welfare state than the usual feminist dismissal of William Beveridge as seeing women
as second-class citizens: though the resulting legislative and administrative structure
reinforced the traditional gender hierarchy, with married women deemed depen-
dents, it also gave them state support, and viewed motherhood as a public role, which
early twentieth-century feminists had championed. While women’s organisations felt
that Beveridge’s proposals did not reflect their notion of sexual equality, they did not
challenge his prescription of separate spheres.
The chapter on formal education and career choice affirms the centrality of social
class, yet also reveals that most girls were not expected to continue in education,
while both grammar and secondary modern curricula contained elements of pre-
paration for their assumed domestic role. However, whereas little changed for work-
ing-class girls, the middle class was presented with a wider range of job opportunities,
reflected in advice manuals and career novels of the period. Still, few girls appear to
have taken an active interest in choosing a job, relying instead on parents, teachers or
youth employment officers. The influence of parental apathy towards formal educa-
tion and the practice of most female school-leavers remaining at home until marriage
undermines the view that parental authority was severely weakened in the post-war
period.
The discussion of career novels is a useful corrective to the more usual concentra-
tion by women’s magazines on femininity as a ‘career’, though both genres agreed
that the ultimate goal of most women was marriage and motherhood. It was now
generally accepted, however, that domesticity would interrupt rather than terminate
paid employment, and girls were encouraged to opt for jobs which would enable
them to fulfil a triple role, of wife, mother and paid employee. Interestingly, the
author’s interviewees, almost all of whom returned to paid employment after a
period of domesticity, tended to marginalise their role as wives.
The author acknowledges that her small sample (of 23 white women who went to
grammar schools in south London) is not representative of women in the 1950s, and
that some important external agencies are missing from the analysis, though the inter-
viewees themselves acknowledged the importance of only one of these, religion, as a
socialising factor. Nevertheless, the author has succeeded in presenting a balanced
consideration of women both as individuals and as an apparently homogenous group,
while her conclusion that ‘career’ for Englishwomen of the 1950s has to be under-
stood as combining periods of both full-time domesticity and paid employment is
91
convincing. One puzzle is that whereas the author is careful to note that her study
concerns England the title refers to Britain.
University of Southampton Jane McDermid
92

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Reviews 16/10/06 9:32 pm Page 63

Karen L. Edwards University of Exeter

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Laura M. Stevens, The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans,

from the history of emotion to bear on postcolonial studies, demonstrating in a fresh

University of Arkansas Beth Barton Schweiger

Edward Said’s Orientalism, published in 1978, has had an enormous influence on

Literature & History third series 15/2

polarised cultural entities. In a later work, Humanism and Democratic Criticism he

Frome, Somerset Peter Clark

Inga Bryden, Reinventing King Arthur. The Arthurian Legends in Victorian

Lewes, Sussex Asa Briggs

Literature & History third series 15/2

Alan Robinson, Imagining London, 1770–1900, Palgrave, 2004, pp. xix +

De Montfort University, Leicester Jeffrey Hill

R. Dellamora, Friendship’s Bonds. Democracy and the Novel in Victorian

Lewes, Sussex Asa Briggs

Literature & History third series 15/2

In this examination of the relationship between domesticity and modernity, Judy

University of Winchester Stephanie Spencer

Joseph Wiesenfarth (ed.), History and Representation in Ford Madox Ford’s

Literature & History third series 15/2

University of Leicester Victoria Stewart

University of Winchester Stephanie Spencer

Literature & History third series 15/2

Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes, Teaching the Representation of the

University of Winchester Tom Lawson

M. Cox (ed.), E.H. Carr: a critical appraisal, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004,

A negative view of Carr’s career could characterise it as follows. In the name of

Southport, Lancs. Christopher Parker

Literature & History third series 15/2

Richard Lehan, Realism and Naturalism: The Novel in an Age of Transition,