...at least in our productive field, or indeed of mentioning every book. (Eighteenth-century studies, reviewed by Cynthia Wall in the Summer 2006 issue, produce less than half as much.) An annual reviewer can, however, offer overviews of the year's work together with slightly fuller reporting of the contents of the most significant or interesting ones than dust jackets, back covers, and bibliographies can provide. Probably her most useful service is that of distinguishing and connecting: sorting this over-ample production to suggest some of the reading paths a scholar might want to take. What follows is, of course, no more than one reader's perception of where publishers and scholars have been most interestingly active in the last year. Part of the pleasure for the reviewer comes from the interaction between pre-existing interests and what one discovers in this unusual form of marathon consumption. A different reviewer would be struck by different patterns. Caveat lector.

Publishing trends can be no less interesting than intellectual ones. Of the 218 books received, 112 were new scholarly monographs (or jointly authored studies)--still a very large number, despite the increasing reluctance of libraries to invest in printed monographs and the decisions of many presses to curtail or eliminate this rarely profitable genre. There were also six biographies, thirty collections of scholarly essays, thirty-eight editions and anthologies (some of them multi-volume), and a number of contributions to the now-popular publishers' genres of the reader's guide, the companion, or the "Advances in X Studies" sampling of recent criticism on a single author. (1) Palgrave, with thirty-one monographs--almost four times that of any other single press--has emerged as far and away the dominant presence in sheer numbers. Many though not all of these are first books. The service to young scholars is particularly important, though quality is mixed in several respects. Small type and narrow margins are no doubt a necessary price to pay in otherwise solidly produced volumes, often illustrated and on good, if thin, paper. One wishes that editorial standards (including but not limited to copy editing) were more consistently high--authors will have to take on this latter responsibility themselves. Other publishers continue more or less in proportions of the recent past: Oxford and Cambridge (the latter with strong Romantic and Victorian series) follow with eight monographs each, Virginia contributed six through its excellent, and beautifully produced, Victorian series, and Ashgate and Ohio (both also with nineteenth-century series), Toronto, Routledge, and Yale published four each, trailed by Princeton and Manchester with three, and then a much wider spread of mostly American university presses with one or two titles each. Palgrave was also a major presence in the publication of essay collections with five, followed by three from Cambridge (including one of the biannual volumes of Victorian Literature and Culture) and two from Ashgate; twenty other collections (including two volumes of the Dickens Studies Annual and one annual volume of Symbolism) were distributed among the same number of presses.

As a publisher of teaching editions, Broadview is both the largest contributor and one of the best. Their fourteen texts are carefully and attractively printed, with illustrations, scholarly introductions, notes, chronologies, bibliographies, and well-chosen supplemental texts from contemporary literary and nonliterary sources. Their titles this year show a heavy preponderance of books from the latter part of the century, including H. Rider Haggard's She, Ouida's Moths, George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Amy Levy's Romance of a Shop and Reuben Sachs, and Vernon Lee's "Hauntings" and Other Fantastic Tales, as well as some lesser-known midcentury titles including Dinah Mulock Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman and Anna Murphy Jameson's Shakespeare's Heroines; and The Idea of Being Free: A Mary Hays Reader from the early part of the century. The editors of these volumes deserve more recognition than this review has space to provide, but please see the book list at the end. Norton Critical Editions, the pioneer in critically supplemented text publishing, has issued a second edition of Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native, edited by Phillip Mallett, with new material. Fyfield-Carcanet published a particularly attractive volume of nonsense verse and drawings (together with selections from the much-less-familiar travel writings) of Edward Lear, "Over the Land and Over the Sea": Selected Nonsense and Travel Writings, edited by Peter Swaab. Black Apollo Press gives us Margaret Harkness's interesting novella-cum-social documentary now titled In Darkest London as the first in an announced series of texts by forgotten Victorian writers. Among the more strictly scholarly editions, there are new hardback volumes in the complete works of Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde undertaken by Cambridge and Oxford University Press, respectively. The Austen volumes, Emma (edited by Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan), Mansfield Park (edited by John Wiltshire), and Jane Austen in Context (essays by various hands edited by the general editor of the edition, Janet Todd) initiate that important and excellently produced edition; while the texts of "De Profundis" and "Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis," edited by Ian Small, and the two published versions of The Picture of Dorian Gray, edited by Joseph Bristow and Ian Small, bring to three volumes thus far the equally definitive Wilde edition. There are also five volumes from Thoemmes-Continuum's Victorian Novels of Oxbridge Life, a series edited by Christopher Stray; for titles see the Books Received. Pickering and Chatto have brought out a four-volume Collected Letters of Wilkie Collins (William Baker, Andrew Gasson, Graham Law, and Paul Lewis, editors). And two new volumes--containing his work on John Milton and William Blake, edited by Angela Esterhammer, and on other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century topics, edited by Imre Salusinszky--have appeared in Toronto's ongoing series of the complete critical works of Northrop Frye. Paul Douglass has edited a selection of the letters of Lady Caroline Lamb, The Whole Disgraceful Truth, and Peter Gordon a selection (1885-1913) from the journals of the politically active Louisa Mary, Lady Knightley of Fawsley, entitled Politics and Society. The Liberty Fund has reprinted James Mackintosh's Vindiciae Gallicae and Other Writings on the French Revolution, edited by Donald Winch. While digital editions (not yet consistently part of SEL reviews) increase, led by the pioneering Blake and Dante Gabriel Rossetti digital archives in our field, and many teachers and students make use of free online reading texts where available, print apparently remains for now the preferred format for scholarly editing, for publishing teaching texts, and for republishing "lost" books and authors. When the advantages of the "long tail" phenomenon (more money from digitally publishing more in smaller numbers for very small specialized audiences), now being exploited in digital music publishing, are reconciled with the economic concerns of print publishers and academic demands for rigorous editing and peer review, the situation may change, particularly for nonteaching editions.

Not surprisingly, major books on big subjects for the Victorian period tend to engage largely if not exclusively with the novel; their Romantic counterparts, with poetry. The best of these books are not genre studies, although they take account of genre. They put forward broader historical arguments about how novels or lyric poetry are in their generic forms and verbal modes active participants in some aspect of a larger intellectual or cultural or material history: to give a few examples from the most important of this year's books, classical political economics and the novel (Catherine Gallagher's The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel), the construction of bourgeois subjectivity (Nancy Armstrong's How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719-1900), modernity and the city (James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin's edited collection, Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780-1840), ethnography (James Buzard's Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels), historicized affect and lyric poetry (Thomas Pfau's Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Truama, and Melancholy, 1790-1840), geology and poetry (Noah Heringman's Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology), phonographic desire and narrative practice (Ivan Kreilkamp's Voice and the Victorian Storyteller), visual longing and the romance (Jonah Siegel, Haunted Museum: Longing, Travel, and the Art-Romance Tradition). Not all of these studies are limited to a single genre or even medium. Such studies are at once historical and literary in ways that do not reduce either to literary history or to the history of an idea, a technology, or a cultural practice. "Discourse" is still an important term through which some of them bring literary and extraliterary texts, events, or practices together, but these books are especially interested in the particular situations of literary authors and the forms through which they inflect those interests they share with other disciplines or cultural practices.

As the examples above will have already indicated, substantial numbers of this year's books are organized around the intersections of literature with other disciplines, discourses, or intellectual traditions (particularly the visual arts, science, economics, religion, and the history of print culture or of the book). Others explore special topics using literature or literary lives as evidence (work and class; empire, nation, and political subjectivity; childhood and the past) or more commonly, take up such topics as theme and imagery in specific texts or as characteristic concerns of specific authors. The largest number of books, however, fall under one or another genre: principally the novel and poetry, with a scattering of work on prose autobiographical and travel writing and on drama or performance. While there are several notable studies devoted to realist and naturalist fiction, realism's others are well represented. The gothic novel drew special attention this year with continuing interest in detective (crime) fiction or prison narratives, and several studies of both new woman and colonial adventure fiction. Special topics or kinds of poetry examined include the poetry of politically engaged nineteenth-century republicans, the poetry of "indifference," the nineteenth-century sonnet, Victorian poetry of melancholy, and the fin-de-siecle poem. Studies focusing on the late nineteenth century are particularly well represented among books of all kinds, including many teaching editions. Monographs on a single author are still produced in large numbers. Some authors, notably William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, and Henry James, are everywhere--not only as the subjects of books but in the chapters and essays of books on other topics. Finally, and happily, there are some surprises and curiosities--books that do not fit easily under any rubric but are either enlightening or entertaining or both: for example, Franco Moretti's brief, elegant demonstration of what a different kind of reading can accomplish (Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary Theory); or two strong collections that reflect on reading and criticism in homage to the work of major critics and teachers, Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller. Among maverick books somewhat less heavyweight but highly readable: two books on Romantic liars, imposters, and forgers (Debbie Lee's Romantic Liars: Obscure Women Who Became Impostors and Challenged an Empire is especially lively), another on the fortunes of French actresses in England (The French Actress and Her English Audience, by John Stokes), and one on curious museum collections with literary associations (Judith Pascoe, The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors). Read on.

THE NOVEL (MOSTLY VICTORIAN)

I begin with what is by far the most numerous category: studies of the novel and other narrative fictions, including works on realism or its others and on individual novelists (fifty books, not counting those discussed under special topics or disciplinary conjunctures in later sections). As noted above, some of the most interesting of these look at the novel afresh from the perspective of its extensive engagements with some aspect of the intellectual climate or material environment of its production. Gallagher's major study of the economic discourse in which both economists and novelists participated, The Body Economic, is conducted with all the attention to subtlety of argument and rhetoric that we have come to expect of her work. Gallagher gives us a far closer and more careful account than any previous study of the evolving thinking within economics. As she points out, many of the critiques of classical political economic theories that literary historians associate with an oppositional cultural critique are in fact first voiced by economists inside the discipline. She organizes her study around what she sees as two distinctive conceptual and figurative traditions that she terms "bioeconomics" (a theory of value centered in life, force, or natural vitality) and "somaeconomics" (the calculus of sensuous and emotional feeling, pleasure and pain, as it was seen to motivate human economic behavior). No brief review can do justice to the complex arguments Gallagher lays out for us, but these readings of economic thinking are interwoven--as they were in contemporary practice, she argues--with readings of the same issues as they are adopted (sometimes, as in Dickens, through "hostile take-over") and supplemented or criticized from within by novelists, themselves often reflecting on their own relationship to markets, value, and economic motivation. Her chief examples are from Dickens (Hard Times and Our Mutual Friend) and George Eliot (Scenes of Clerical Life and Daniel Deronda; Eliot, she notes, was in general a more sympathetic but not uncritical collaborator in forging a shared discourse). The virtues of Gallagher's book are inevitably in the details; suffice it to say that this important study should refine and reorient literary critical treatments of the fraught but--in Gallagher's view--often productive relations between economics and the nineteenth-century novel.

Daniel Hack's The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel, focused more particularly on novelists' efforts to construe their own roles within the theories of value Gallagher lays out, has interesting things to say about the difficulties with which writers struggled to justify their work against charges of unproductiveness and begging. Either novels are material products subject to market valuation, in which case the writer can be construed as a productive worker (even though others do the physical labor of turning text into book) but has no claim for support outside what sales of books will generate. Or the text is a purely intellectual creation on which no price can be set, in which case the author risks being classed with the pauper dependent on public or private charity, with novels--however entertaining, instructive, and effective at calling the reader out of egoism into morally beneficial sympathy with others--all too similar to the elaborate and often professionally produced fictions known as begging letters (which were, Hack shows, a pervasive presence in Victorian life). Hack is a subtle and clever reader of the novels' dramatizations of these predicaments (occasionally a little too ingenious). He draws extensively on extraliterary writings to document and analyze the begging-letter phenomenon and argue for its structural and rhetorical similarity to novel writing. At times, however, the analogy begins to seem strained and the critic overinsistent on either/or choices for the hapless novel writer.

Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees offers a somewhat different way (or rather three ways) to approach literary history on a large temporal and geographic scale. It is in many ways an eye-opening book. In the first place, Moretti proposes that we look at literary history (and specifically the history of the novel) globally--and not simply to track the dispersion of an essentially Western model. The difficulty, of course, is finding anyone sufficiently expert in not only Western but, say, Chinese, Indian, and African fictional narrative. The book is thus something of an experiment and a demonstration of how one might go about overcoming the obstacles. It is very much a model for collaborative research, and it is one that incorporates the use both of statistical information and of that information's visual display. The three short essays have been published before but collecting them--with a brief introduction and longer afterword--in the covers of this attractive small book is welcome. Moretti's direct and deceptively simple style is enviable. He seeks to produce new objects of knowledge (and to alter a number of assumptions and received opinions about literary history) by deliberately turning to the abstracting and visualizing methods of the graph, the diagrammatic "map," and the tree. Moretti uses these three forms of abstract modeling (mutually supplementary) to record and display large amounts of information gathered from an international sampling of secondary works by national experts. His extensively discussed examples include a graph of the temporal patterns of historical emergence, globally, of the novel--which can be coordinated with major political and social events in each country; another graph of temporal patterns of emergence for subgenres of the British novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, again readable with the history of various kinds of events; geographical patterns of movement within regional as compared with provincial novels, displayed as diagrammatic "maps"; and a schematic "tree" showing the gradual evolution through selective reception of what turns out to be the critical ingredient in successful detective fiction, the meaningful clue. Moretti's point is that this kind of collection, categorization, and schematic display can reveal surprising patterns that, in turn, will lead literary historians and critics to formulate new questions, sending them back to close (from "distant") reading of individual texts to postulate answers. The process, exemplified in each of Moretti's three chapters, can produce, in the hands of an informed and skillful critic, significant revisions to received literary history--accounts not necessarily imaginable through the inductive reading of individual texts alone. It is also a tentative step in a badly needed escape from the provincialism of so many of our pronouncements on the nineteenth-century British novel.

Armstrong's How Novels Think is focused on the novel in Britain, and one wonders whether and how it would be possible to make use of her account of what novels do in a global context (I hasten to add that Armstrong was one of the contributors to the multivolume collection of essays on the novel as world literature that Moretti edited in the early 2000s). As it stands, Armstrong's current book might be an example of what Robert Alter (reviewed hereafter) has in mind when he turns away from criticism that stresses realism's ideological determinations. Yet Armstrong's is an attractive, often compelling, if not unfamiliar thesis. She too is interested in constructing large-scale literary history as a form of cultural (and political) history. It is easy to see her narrative as a further development of her influential earlier study of the novel, Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987) (though the idea has its roots as far back as Ian Watt's 1957 The Rise of the Novel). It is not writers but novels who are the characters in her story, which puts the insights generated by "the death of the author" to work in grand style. As she puts it, not only are "the history of the novel and the history of the modern subject, quite literally, the same"; novels produce individuals with interiority by "thinking" as if individuals already existed (p. 3). The expository fiction is deployed throughout as an enabling presupposition: novels (or the distributed social power embodied in them) "think like individuals about the difficulties of fulfilling oneself as an individual, under specific cultural historical conditions." They "think" individuals into existence as narrating subjects, as objects of narration, and as readers. Moreover, she goes on, they do so by discrediting alternative conceptions of the person as dangerous, idiosyncratic, or otherwise minor--relegating them as characters to gothic genres and gothic moments of realist fiction. The story Armstrong tells in broad outlines, by means of allegorized readings of selected novels and novelists, is of fiction managing the imbalances and tensions between expressive individualism and social stability, while establishing and maintaining both as hegemonic. She tracks an eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century stress on expressive individualism (enabling middle-class empowerment) as it shifts, with the Victorians, to depicting subjects whose development within a stable society demands displacing asocial, expressive desires on to socially appropriate objects--mad women, for example. She reads the proliferation of subgenres (such as sensation novels) as periodic outbreaks of what major realist novels struggle to incorporate and neutralize, anti-individualist and antisocial energies that threaten the always fragile balance between self and society required by realist novels of the mature modern subject. In Armstrong's history, late-nineteenth-century romance--imperialist adventure as well as vampire and gothic fictions--destroys that balance, in a return of sensibility that offers the disruptive possibility of transindividual desire sufficient to forge mass movements across race, class, and gender. The body of Armstrong's book reads, in succession, the "thinking" of Romantic novels (Waverley, Frankenstein), Victorian novels (Wuthering Heights, Dombey and Son, The Mill on the Floss, Tess of the D'Urbervilles); and late-century romances (She, Dracula, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Heart of Darkness, The Turn of the Screw). "I cannot quite believe," Armstrong confesses in a revealing comment, "that any novel can reach in and modify the ideological core of the genre and still remain a novel" (p. 10). This account assumes but outdoes what studies of the institutionalization of literature in schools and universities have maintained, that literature, perhaps particularly the novel, can be made to function as a socially and politically central mechanism for making liberal national subjects, both at home and in the territories of empire. "Can be made to function" implies at least an institutional, if not a political, agency. Armstrong's rhetoric (novels "think") empowers novels at the expense of individuals (novelists or readers) but also at the expense of some more definite notion of social and political, not to say imaginative, agency. Hers is not a very hopeful view, though she builds courageously on Michel Foucault's insights. It does not easily accommodate a future for the novel as a culturally creative--or a pleasurable--literary form.

Four books from senior scholars (I will discuss three in some detail) reflect on nineteenth-century realist fiction in its relation to an emerging urban, bourgeois, industrial, and imperial modernity. Peter Brooks's short book, Realist Vision, originally a series of lectures, sets out to "make the case for realism" (p. 19) by leading us to a renewed appreciation of the "discourse of things" (p. 20) in some of the great French and English novels of the nineteenth century. Brooks's realists are describers, primarily of the visual, committed to the proposition that things--property, objects, their accumulation into wealth and clutter, and even their "vaporous" transience--create the environments that shape characters and open them to readerly comprehension. The book's chapters study a selection of novels (and paintings by Gustave Caillebotte, Edouard Manet, and Gustave Courbet) to chart a brief history of its subject from Honore de Balzac, Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, and George Eliot through the naturalists, Emile Zola and George Gissing, to Henry James and the modernist turn inward in despite of so many things. The readings are always acute and suggestive. The book does not pretend to break new ground so much as to re-introduce the pleasures of realism for the reader and defend the realist novel's pervasive interest in model, miniaturized worlds with ordinary characters, animated in part through relentless attention to the thick texture of variegated material life. Brooks's chapter on Dickens serves as a counterexample to the French realist/naturalist mainstream, investigating, in Hard Times, the "metamorphic play of the narrative style" (p. 44) deployed as protest against a utilitarian attitude to things. But this play with things is, in the end, not at all alien to the realism Brooks savors.

Alter's Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel, which also began as a series of lectures, is similarly a subtly learned defense of classic realism against some recent efforts to dismiss language and style in realist fiction as (knowingly or unknowingly) fallacious, a function of ideology--or to read them instrumentally as transparent registrations of the real. Alter's emphasis is less on description--Brooks's realist novel's highly mediated encounters with a thing-filled bourgeois life--than on narrations of subjectivity: the novel's representations of the modern city filtered through experience embodied in a character. This "practice of conducting the narrative more and more through the moment-by-moment experience, sensory, visceral, and mental ... of the main character or characters" he calls "experimental realism" (p. x). The term suggests what could be seen as a retrospective construction of the tradition from the vantage point of modernism. Alter's realism develops the means for representing urban experience from Flaubert (Paris) through Dickens (the London of Our Mutual Friend) and the Russian novelist Andrei Bely (in his novel Petersburg) to culminate in the fiction of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka. Alter is particularly interested in the effects of the modern city on the senses of time and space in relation to boundaries of the self--the phenomenological rendering of urban modernity, with attendant shifts and adjustments to both the sensory and the epistemological absorption and construction of reality. As one might expect from one of our most impressive translators, Alter focuses on novelistic language--syntax, rhythm, figuration--as the register and bearer of such changes. In his two chapters on Our Mutual Friend, for example, he sets out to characterize Dickens's "faculty of archaic vision" (p. 47) by analyzing the effects of a highly metaphoric style that, he suggests, induces readerly anxiety over the disparities in scale and behavior between human observers and inhuman monstrosities. The city, for Dickens, Alter suggests, is "a theater of chaos and dissolution" (p. 55) perceived as "growth running out of control" (p. 80). Alter is particularly sensitive to the figurative stratagems Dickens develops, especially in the later novels, to convey a visceral sense of the city's shock to the senses and thus to ontological certainties.

Richard Lehan and Louis James (Realism and Naturalism: The Novel in an...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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