In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

31:3 Book Reviews tively but culturaUy misunderstood; and Egypt is a distant and beckoning goal, not subject to conquest, but a submerged image of paradise. Other stories in Victorian Fairy Tales are less obviously political and cautionary than "AU My Doing" and "The Happy Prince." Kenneth Grahame's "The Reluctant Dragon" (now a Disney Studios video) pokes fun at the conventions of the fairy tale— dragon and knight are equally averse to violence, despite the villagers' lust for a good fight. The dragon, in tmth, prefers writing sonnets to breathing fire, St. George is much less fierce than reputed, and the whole ends in a jolly banquet. Rudyard Kipling's "The Potted Princess" is an equally charming tale drawing upon Indian legend and refusing overt moralizing. A surprising number of these stories suggest the limits of sexual stereotyping and explore the ways boys and girls may exhibit the virtues conventionally assigned to the other sex. Both George MacDonald's "The Day Boy and the Night Girl" and Mary Louisa Molesworth's "The Story of a King's Daughter" show girls who are courageous and boys who must learn tenderness and human sympathy. Similarly, Mary De Morgan's "The Toy Princess" criticizes the conventions of female passivity as does Evelyn Sharp's "The Spell of the Magician's Daughter." Victorian Fairy Tales presents an anay of stories delightfully told, and at the same time the collection reveals how thoroughly these fairy tales were imbued with the social and cultural questions of their time. The great majority of the stories here were published after 1870; reading them together may suggest further avenues for investigation and may add an important dimension to our understanding of late Victorian culture. On a more immediate level, however , the book is both pleasant reading and a pleasure to look at. Zipes has included at least one of the illustrations originally published with each tale. Particularly outstanding are those by Walter Crane, Richard Doyle, Ernest Shepherd (the illustrator for A. A. Milne), and Alice B. Woodward. The book itself is beautifully designed, with outstanding ornamental capitals in the pre-Raphaelite manner. Mary Ellis Gibson University of North Carolina at Greensboro VICTORIAN PUBLISHING N. N. Feltes. Modes of Production of Victorian Novels. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986. $18.95 Most accounts of the Victorian publishing industry have been unremittingly empirical; most expositions of Marxist literary theory have been conducted at the highest levels of abstraction. In Modes of Production of Victorian Novels, N. N. Feltes attempts a Marxist-structuralist analysis of the transformation of the English novel in the interval from 1836 to 1910. In 98 pages of denselyargued prose, Feltes explains the demise of the three-decker and the develop379 31:3 Book Reviews ment of a mass market for Uterary productions, drawing his evidence from previous scholarship and from "symptomatic" readings of five novels: Pickwick Papers, Henry Esmond, Middlemarch, Tess of the d Urbervilles, and Howards End. Feltes clearly assumes an audience well-versed in Marxist theory and terminology . In his "Preface" he aUudes to the work of Louis Althusser, Nicos Poulantzas and Terry Eagleton. Following Poulantzas, Feltes conceives of Victorian England as a social formation dominated by a general mode of production (capitalism); foUowing Eagleton, he assumes that in any social formation there will exist a number of distinct "modes of literary production" (the serial publication of novels, for example, as distinguished from publication in three volumes). The eventual emergence of any one of these as the dominant Uterary mode wiU be determined in the final instance by the general mode of production . Feltes follows Eagleton in assuming that the individual literary work bears the impress of its specific literary mode of production. Feltes also accepts Althusser's postulate that the literary work "interpellates" its reader by causing her to regard the social relations thus recorded in the text as "obvious" and "natural." Feltes's own theoretical contribution is to distinguish the "commodity-book," which he regards as the commodity-form of petty-commodity production, from the "commodity-text," which he regards as the commodity-form of the fully capitalist literary mode of production. Henry Esmond is an example of a "commoditybook...

pdf

Share