British Isles Books

Lorraine Clark opens her comparative study of Blake and Kierkegaard by describing two acts of renunciation. As she understands it Kierkegaard's act of withdrawing from his engagement to Regina did not work out in the way he secretly hoped. He had somehow imagined that the reward for his renunciation would be Regina restored. It did not happen .Regina married almost immediately afterwards, and Kierkegaard was left with himself and the creation of his works of genius. Blake's renunciation had to do with his friend and patron Hayley who wished him to compromise and succeed in the world of commerce. Blake suffered a three year withdrawal and depression but in the end renounced the 'compromise' and went on to create his last great prophetic works. Both these renunciations Clarke sees as rejections of 'compromise' and affirmation of a deeper creative integrity.
In another central comparison Clark considers the way Blake and Kierkegaard contend with what she calls the 'spectre of dialectic'. She considers the way Blake and Kiekegaard in parallel contend with the skeptical naysaying elements of Mind and Self. Blake's Spectre of Dialectic' and Kierkegaard's Concept of Dread are compared and elucidated. And we are helped to more deeply understand these two great rebellious and yet deeply religious spirits,
Clarke is an excellent writer who makes complex ideas clear and understandable.

This book is not quite as easy to read nor as interesting as Hanawault's book The Ties That Bound, but this book still gives insight into the culture of fifteenth century England. As a history and political science major, I greatly enjoyed reading a book that looks at history and literature to help create a broader perspective about what this time period was like. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in English history.

Schoenfeldt masterfully combines a sophisticated literary analysis with the cultural prevalence of humoral medicine to provide real insight into the ways that people experienced and expressed their identities in early modern England. His book is well written, well considered, and should be well received. Hooray!

Gallagher attempts to organize British Victorian novels and economic criticism with two well-defined conceptual tools: bioeconomics and somaeconomics. The first covers those concerned with looking at Victorian economic writings from the vantage point of life and death (Malthus), while the latter follows the lines of utilitarianism initiated by Bentham and having to do with questions of pleasure and pain. These concepts are applied to the developments (and rejections) of political economy over the span of the XIXth century. What was most helpful to me is her use of these concepts in relation to her readings of Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (bioeconomic) and Hard Times (somaeconomic) while comparing these novels to the work of John Ruskin (Munera Pulveris,1871 is used to help elucidate Dickens's last novel Our Mutual Friend).

Gallagher has a great skill in combining her grasp of theory in both economics and literature to her sound readings of Malthus, Ricardo, Ruskin, Dickens, and Eliot. There are other treats as well. Throughout the book she includes excellent observations on other writers (i.e. Herbert Spencer) that generally don't receive much attention. Gallagher states in her introduction that students of literature (esp. from the early XXthc. to the present) have generally overlooked the great political economists of the XIXth century in part because of the "packaging" of their thought as ideological, irrelevant, or simply useless. Such labels should never prevent us from engaging with these texts. This practice can be noted even in editing practices, where little or no information is given about economic issues that determine the outcome of realist novels. Here I would signal a great exception in some British editing practices, esp. those influenced by Ian Small. Today we can no longer afford to dismiss economic thought from our analyses (nor should we have in the past!) of literary works and certainly not from our editing practices. To do so is essentially to misread, or to cause to misread, and thereby to treat the Victorians unhistorically. Any Victorianist should know this. When I began looking at some of the anthologies from two or more decades ago I find small pieces from Ruskin, Morris, Marx, and Engels. Rarely Smith, Ricardo, or Jevons. The new economic criticism does not ignore these "Other" contributions to the development of economics. Gallagher's readings attempt to go beyond simple models of production, distribution, and consumer economics to consider the effects of other economic thought as well.

Gallagher does not treat the late XIXth century with as much detail as she does the High Victorian period. For those interested in the period following 1871 (the year that marks the shift, the "Marginalist Revolution") I would recommend (for late British) Regenia Gagnier and Ian Small. Walter Benn Michaels (The Gold Standard) is still the best for late XIXth c. American literature and economics. I also highly recommend Gallagher's The Industrial Revolution of English Fiction (1988) which will provide a broader context for The Body Economic.

Having lived in Lincolnshire and experienced some of those derelict bommber bases along with a distance relative who perished as a Lancaster tail gunner, I had to know more! This book is an excellent reference manual taking the reader from the amateur beginnings of Bomber Barons ideals with the leaflet raids to the remorseless destruction of targets such as Dresden towards the end of the RAF Bomber Campaign in Europe. The book is split into 21 phases of the campaign based around either technical or strategic developments. Most raids are identified individually giving numbers despatched, losses and brief results/summaries. The introductions to the phases give good summary briefs of that particular stage of the campaign, be it Yalta or Window.
An interesting spin off from this book was with my Dutch father in law who was a 'guest' worker in Kassel on the night of 22/23 Oct '43. According to the family it was apparently the only time he had talked about his experiences when he discussed this raid in the book with me. Not a pleasant experience, he lost most of his friends on that night.
Otherwise this book is a definite requirement for the amateur historian or just the plain old hobbyist.

full of cute and cool images of 60s! so young and fresh, i miss 60s in London. is there unabridged version? i need it madly..

Brilliant! Well written, beautiful prose and clear argumentation all make this a good read and a worthy addition to the library of anyone interested in early-20th century literature. At times it is slowed down by a devotion academic hoop-jumping, but this is the exception rather than the rule and can easily be forgiven considering the overall quality of the work.

Some 120 years ago after the first publication of A Rebours in Paris, the novel is still in print and still being devoured by devotees of exotic literature. Destined for more than a single period, for a limited number of aesthetes in the late 19th century, ARebours has had a continued appeal for more than a full century. Indeed, Cyril Conolly in his The Modern Movement labels the novel one of the "key books" to literature that molded "the modern sensibility."
Cevasco's study focuses on the origin of Huysmans's novel, its title, themes, style, and impact on such figures as George Moore, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Simmons, Aubrey Beardsley, John Gray, W.B> Yeats, James Joyce, and Evelyn Waugh. In his final chapter, Cevasco has briefer accounts of the influence of A Rebours on such figures as Proust, T.S. Eliot, Henry Miller, ands Ernest Hemingway.The clarity of Cevasco's analyses provides an imprewssive view of the Breviary of tyhe Decadence.
Highly recommended to students of serious literature.

This is definitely one of Hodge's better works. The history is less daunting in its complexity than in some of her earlier work. I have found some of her books off-putting when they become too much like an irrelevant history lesson, but this one does not fall into that trap. It manages to convey a very strong sense of period however and the accuracy is faultless. The story is particularly good in this one too, the main romance is surprising, and very lovely. My only quibble would be the lack of attention that is given to the romance for various reasons but this is only a very minor point. The scenes with Nelson and Lady Hamilton are a treat and if you enjoy Georgette Heyer you are bound to love this book.

Librettists and composers were quick to note how readily the plots and vivid scenes of the poems and novels of Sir Walter Scott lent themselves to reinterpretation as operas. Indeed since 1811 there have been at least 85 operas or musical dramas based on Scott. Only Shakespeare has inspired more. By far the best known and most frequently heard today is Gaetano Donizetti's 1835 LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR. Five other composers also turned Scott's 1819 THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR into song.

January 25 and 26, 2007 Asheville Lyric Opera and The Opera Company of North Carolina will stage LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR (see [...]). I am encouraging friends and students of my coming introductory course on Sir Walter Scott to be at Diana Wortham Theatre in the heart of Asheville for this production.

But first they should read the novel.

THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR is one of Walter Scott's five or six best romances, and by common accord his most tightly woven and scripted. It is based on real history, a tragedy whose otherwise depressingly sad ending Sir Walter felt obliged to respect. But that two innocent lovers, Edgar Ravenswood and Lucy Ashton, met such unmerited doom cried out to the young future Cardinal John Henry Newman almost as an affront to the justice of God. Newman felt the same way about Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet's Ophelia. The opera focuses on the love story and for dramatic purposes ignores, compresses or changes anything else in Scott's novel that gives political or historical background, context or motivation.

The background is this in the earliest Scott editions (later shifted a few years ahead in time; my references below are to the first edition). Anne Stuart has been on the thrones of Scotland and England since 1702 and will soon, after 1707, be Queen of the brand new United Kingdom in which Scotland will cease to be an independent nation. Many Scots were scheming that on her anticipated death without children, her nephew James Francis Edward Stuart (The Old Pretender) would succeed to the throne.

Scott's novel is set in Lammermoor, in the southeast of Scotland. Wolfscrag, a lonely tower above "the German Sea" is the last remaining property of the once powerful, ancient noble family of Ravenswood. Not many miles away is its old castle and intervening square miles of farms and woods now in the hands of an anti-Royalist upstart Sir William Ashton, a political trimmer and lawyer who has legally but unfairly dispossessed Sir Alan Ravenswood. A convinced Presbyterian, Sir William as local magistrate also approved efforts to break up the illegal Episcopalian burial service for the broken hearted Lord of Ravenswood. The son, Edgar Ravenswood, vows revenge but falls in love with Lucy Ashton, Sir William's daughter. Both Edgar and Sir William attempt a reconciliation.

Lucy's mother Eleanor, a haughty Douglas, is off visiting London and friends of Queen Anne. In that permissive atmosphere Edgar and Lucy secretly promise each other by tokens and in writing to be true to each other and to marry when they can. Eleanor, catching wind of developments, rushes home and forces Lucy to marry an amiable rich heir of Eleanor's choosing.

Odds being strong that many readers of this review have not yet read THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR, I will speak no more of the small steps over the intervening year that lead almost inevitably to Lucy's stabbing her unwanted husband on their coerced wedding night and her collapse into madness -- all forcefully staged by Donizetti.

Religion, politics and superstition also play huge roles in this novel (rigorously ignored in the opera). Not for nothing do some scholars call Sir Walter Scott father not just of the historical novel but of the political novel as well. And THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR shows how great men and women of Scotland heartlessly move Edgar Ravenswood and Lucy Ashton across a chessboard of high politics. As for religion, Lady Eleanor's trump card against her daughter's pledge to Edgar is a text from NUMBERS XXX: 2 -5 forbidding a daughter to honor a pledge unless her father consents (which the henpecked Sir William would like to do but dares not in opposition to his consort).

This novel is intensely Scottish and Sir Walter says: "this would not be a Scottish story, unless it manifested a tinge of Scottish superstition" (Vol. II. Ch. 9). There are at least four witches actively in play, several legends and dire prophecies. There are signs and omens.

And in the person of impoverished Edgar's steward, Caleb Balderstone, Scott has created one of his four or five greatest comic figures. Caleb lies, bluffs and pretends to the world that his young master is wealthy, powerful and revered. Caleb pretends, for instance, toward novel's end, that Wolfscrag is burning down, so that he can later explain the poverty-induced absence of portraits, furniture and tapestry. Rebuked by his usually indulgent master, Caleb retorts in broad lowland Scots: "Fir for shame, your honour! ... it fits an auld carle like me weel eneugh to tell lees for the credit of the family, but it wadna beseem the like o' your honour's sell" (Vol. II. Ch.12).

Read the novel. Then listen to the Deutschegrammophon DVD of Joan Sutherland singing Lucia at the Met on November 13, 1982. Time permitting, come to Western North Carolina in January 2008 and watch it all come together live at Asheville Civic Opera.

It does not get any better than this: Scott plus Donizetti.


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