Victorian Sexual Dissidence ed. by Richard Dellamora (review)

428 letters in canada 1999 law, history, travel: `serious and beautiful books' B and, at least in literature, included the biggest names of the day: Tennyson, Meredith, Hardy, and Stevenson. There is discussion of each genre and a very useful table showing individual imprints in the 1870s and 1880s. Chapter 4 is on the later years of the imprint as Kegan Paul, Trench and Trubner from 1889-1911, a time of falling profits, financial crises, re-formation and new management. It was a sign of the times when the chairman of the new board was a German sponge merchant, contemplating the difference between a sponge in his warehouse and the book on the bookshelf. But there was incompatibility even among the book men in the company, conflicting personalities, divided loyalties, and diverse goals. Howsam cleverly expands her broader arguments with detailed illustrations. Her account of one company representative's trip around the colonies, for example, could easily be extracted and expanded to a fine case study in its own right. As the years went on the firm published fewer titles, and it was taken over by Routledge in 1911. The final chapter concerns the legacy of Kegan Paul, turning back to Charles Kegan Paul's autobiographical memoir, and with a glance too at the role of the publishers' wives and their influence on the companies' fortunes. The book concludes with two brief appendices: a chronology and a Who's Who. I think it's true to say that although the material here is useful, it is not presented in a striking way. Indeed the whole layout of the book is odd. It begins with a plate section of a dozen illustrations, interesting though not well reproduced, perhaps inevitable when they are not on glossy paper, but forgettable because they appear before you know what the book is about. As already noted, there are various tables interspersed with the text. They have the look of the word processor about them rather than of the typesetter, easy and cheap for the publisher but hard on the author whose hours of meticulous work deserve a format with greater impact, and hard on the reader who must work overtime to interpret the author's intention. One table, for example, is split between two pages, not because it's too long for a single page but presumably just to save space. But perhaps there's a certain unintentional irony that a book about publishers is flawed not by the author, who merits only the highest acclaim, but by her publishers, intervening before the book reaches the reader. Wasn't it always this way? (GILLIAN FENWICK) Richard Dellamora, editor. Victorian Sexual Dissidence University of Chicago Press. viii, 330. US $50.00; US $20.00 A rich offering in the vital field of Victorian gender studies, this collection brings together essays on fin de siècle sexual dissidence by experts in the humanities 429 field (Regenia Gagnier, Christopher Lane, Thaïs Morgan, Yopie Prins, Kathy Psomiades, and Martha Vicinus) as well as some by relative newcomers . Based loosely on three panels organized by Richard Dellamora at the 1996 Modern Language Association Conference, the book retains a tripartite division: part 1, `Re-Gendering Aestheticism,' part 2,`Revisionary Decadence,' and part 3: `Dissident Aesthetics.' Essays range chronologically from 1870 to the transition to modernism, and in subject matter from the `clammy sublime' of female-female attraction in Vernon Lee's fiction to considerations of the relationships between aesthetics and economics, and between homosexual identity and literary study. The collection is thoroughly interdisciplinary, embracing dance, painting, cartoons, and classical studies as well as literature. Throughout, Victorian Sexual Dissidence is characterized by meticulous historical research and theoretical rigour. Experts will find a welcome dialogue with key works in the field. For example, Yopie Prins's essay on`Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters' shifts the focus from Linda Dowling's Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford to `Hellenism and feminism in Victorian Cambridge.' Moreover, many of the essays implicitly question Eve Sedgwick's contention (in the Epistomology of the Closet) that sexual dissidence is structured within binary terms. Yet the collection remains open to the non-expert: in particular, Dellamora's introduction provides...