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ELT 48 : 4 2005 the insight that a "manufacturer" is a "maker" working at a different level of abstraction; the claim that Babbage "treats science as the culmination of poetry"; the idea that just as humans read the Book of Nature, Nature registers (and therefore reads) the work of human agency; and a great discussion of Babbage's disappointment over the fact that the objects of the Great Exhibition were displayed without price tags. Manufacturing Culture is unusual in that, while it thoroughly engages with many Victorian treatises on culture, it doesn't look in much detail at particular cultural practices or "artifacts" (novels, poems, paintings, designs, commodities, etc.). In this, Bizup diverges from many of the other cultural studies critics he is responding to, including Mary Poovey, Catherine Gallagher, Christopher Herbert, and indeed Raymond Williams. Bizup's consistency of approach gives his book a kind of credibility that more diffuse studies sometimes lack; he sets out to describe and analyze a proindustrial rhetoric, and by looking almost exclusively at explicit debates on the subject, Bizup avoids the applesand -oranges problems that materialist critics can face (i.e., is a shop window rhetorical in the same way that a sonnet sequence is?). And yet, in its general overhaul of the way we understand the political valences of "culture," this book necessarily challenges the particular conclusions of the culture-and-society critics who came before, and it would be interesting to hear how Bizup sees his own work revising the literary histories that have grown out of Williams's thesis. Still, by dismantling the grid on which the discourses of culture can be easily translated into critiques of commerce and industry, Bizup has opened the door for many reassessments and new configurations of the literary landscape. DANIEL SIEGEL University of Alabama at Birmingham Conrad Casebook Gene Moore, ed. Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness": A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. vii + 279 pp. Cloth $55.00 Paper $19.95 THE QUESTION naturally arises, when opening the pages of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness": A Casebook, whether this volume is really necessary. There are already a number of useful casebooks, critical editions, and teaching aids that focus on Conrad's novella. Gene Moore ably addresses this question in his introduction and offers a casebook that contains judiciously selected contextualizing materials, a range of critical approaches to Conrad, and materials not readily avail476 Book reviews able in other competing texts. Above all, the collection is very readable and will be accessible to a wide audience. The contextualizing materials begin with Conrad's companion story to Heart of Darkness, "An Outpost of Progress," which offers a complementary portrait—darkly comic and ironic—of the Belgium imperialist endeavor. This leading piece in the casebook suggests the breadth of Conrad's critique of imperialism and will be a useful text for those who choose this volume as an aid for teaching the novel. The first critical approach to Conrad is Patrick Brantlinger's new historicist "Victorians and Africans: The Geneology of the Myth of the Dark Continent." A substantial essay, and well known to Conrad scholars, Brantlinger's work has a postcolonialist slant, focusing on the history of British emancipation legislation; the great Victorian missionaries and explorers; the investigations of race and evolution; and contemporary fiction that explores issues of race, savagery, interracial marriage, and regression ("going native") that interested the Victorian reading public. Brantlinger provides numerous attractive illustrations that will interest a wide audience. Moore follows Brantlinger with a selection from Arthur Conan Doyle's The Crime of the Congo, which offers a vivid and rather vitriolic contemporary condemnation of Leopold II's systematic exploitation and subjugation of the African people. Moore concludes the contextualizing of Heart of Darkness with G. F. W. Hope's memoir of Conrad's first cruise on the Nelliea—a text that has only recently been published (and includes an account of the self-possessed Conrad skinnydipping !)—and with a selection from Zdzislaw Najder's biographical account of Conrad's 1890 voyage into the Congo. The selection from Najder is an obvious but shrewd move on Moore's part, since it includes generous quoting from Conrad's...

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