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Book reviews Repeatedly, the agents of imperialism—Conrad's Marlow as well as Kurtz and Lord Jim, Kipling's Col. Creighton as well as Kim, Forster's Fielding, Orwell's Flory—are caught in the "irony" that "bureaucratic self-effacement over and over again leads to self-aggrandizement." Bivona's general argument that in the imperialist context—Cromer's Egypt, Lugard's West Africa—the concept of "indirect rule" involved the contradictory union of Weberian charisma/bureaucratic repression is a highly original, rewarding one. Though I am suspicious of Bivona's dismissal of older arguments about the economic bases of imperialist expansion, which leads him too easily to treat bureaucratic professionalization as sufficient cause for that expansion, this is a problem of historical interpretation that does not affect Bivona's excellent readings of the texts I've mentioned. These readings are keenly attuned to irony, contradiction, and the psychological complexities of the authors and characters that Bivona treats. At the very least, British Imperial Literature is one of the more interesting, important books on this topic published within the last five or six years—well worth reading by all students of Victorian and early twentieth-century British literature and culture. Patrick Brantlinger ------------------------------ Indiana University Woolf & the Renaissance Sally Greene, ed. Virginia Woolf Reading the Renaissance. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999. xi + 295 pp. $44.95 THIS COLLECTION often essays by separate hands is intended, according to its editor, to trace "Woolf 's footsteps as a reader and reinterpreter of the canon of Renaissance literature as it was conceived in her time" both as a literary historian and as a creative writer. Professor Greene further claims, "As these essays demonstrate, Woolf needs to be reckoned with, along with T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, and Ezra Pound, as a major modernist writer who significantly reconceived the Renaissance in the early twentieth century." Virginia Woolf's relation to the Renaissance is hardly a new subject for investigation. The standard work is Alice Fox's Virginia Woolf and the Literature of the English Renaissance (Clarendon Press, 1990), followed by Juliet Disenberre's Virginia Woolf s Renaissance: Woman Reader or Common Reader? (University of Iowa Press, 1997), but such 343 ELT 43 : 3 2000 studies had appeared well before Fox's book, and many more have been published since. Sally Greene's opening essay, "Michelet, Woolf, and the Idea of the Renaissance," is typical of the methodology employed in these essays, some of which is evident in the following paragraph: No reader of Virginia Woolf needs to be told where in this debate [between Water Pater and John Ruskin] her sympathies lay. Her disappointment in the emerging professionalism of Renaissance studies is evident in a disenchantment with the professor Walter Raleigh, who devolves from esteemed editor of Hakluyt to a pedant satirized across three centuries in Orlando. In Orlando's opening scenes, Woolf burlesques Ruskin's "frosty" Renaissance, melting the frozen waters of the Thames into a liberating "torrent" of energy. That this episode also draws on Thomas Dekker's répertoriai account of strange icy weather on the Thames only begins to suggest the ways in which her uses of the Renaissance are layered, even over-determined—and marked by a loving, playful embrace. (Such a dangerous trifle was Orlando that E. M. W. Tillyard began his wartime polemic The Elizabethan World Picture by dismissing it.) The claim that Walter Raleigh is a target of Woolf 's satire is plausible, but the point is taken as proven when it is merely asserted. J. H. Stape, the most recent editor of Orlando, claims that the pedantic model is Edmund Gosse (Blackwell, 1998, xvi). Similarly, Greene claims that the freezing and melting of the Thames is a satiric reference to Ruskin's view of the Renaissance, while Thomas Dekker's account, usually taken to be the primary source of the ice skating scenes in Orlando, is relegated to an "also." The unverified allusion to Ruskin is thus transformed into the primary inspiration for the event, while Dekker's account is relegated to a secondary role. Finally, the paragraph ends with the gratuitous claim that Tillyard "dismisses" Orlando as a "dangerous trifle" in a "wartime...

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