Précis Reviews

ELT 47 : 2 2004 present undercurrents constitutes the distinguishing feature of his dramatic corpus" and "his greatest contribution to Irish dramatic literature and cultural nationalism." It is these forces and undercurrents that DeGiacomo has outlined in this first book-length study of a playwright whose works have recently resurfaced as Selected Plays: T. C. Murray (1998). Drawing upon diaries, letters, reviews, and Murray's own published essays, as well as on unpublished material in American and Irish archives (scrupulously recorded in parentheses in the text), DeGiacomo has written a comprehensive analysis and useful research guide to Murray's plays: their genesis, composition, performance and impact. The fourteen-page index is a gem of detailed rubrics: under "R" (chosen at random), one finds "Racine" (an important early influence), "reclusiveness," "religion ," "revised endings" (for eight plays!), and even "Robinson, Lennox: alcoholism and." Almost everything that is known about T. C. Murray is contained in this short book, one that may well serve as a crucial stepping stone for longer, more detailed studies of his significant contribution to Irish cultural nationalism. MICHEL W. PHARAND University of South Carolina I Précis Reviews I Heidi Hanrahan University of North Carolina, Greensboro Lewis, Linda M. Germaine de Staël, George Sand and the Victorian Woman Artist. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. ix + 278 pp. $24.95 Lewis's impressive book combines myth criticism, feminist commentary, psychoanalytic criticism, and close reading to examine how four British women writers found inspiration in the writings of de Staël and Sand. Indeed, de Staël's Conine and Sand's Consuelo become "the literary examples to illuminate the way into fictionalized female artistry for two generations of British women writers whose works are replete with subtle and overt references to the French texts." Lewis begins with Géraldine Jewsbury's actress Bianca 242 BOOK REVIEWS Prazzi in "The Half Sisters," calling her a "daughter" of Consuelo and Corrine, a more "pedestrian" heroine who must work and becomes an "exemplum of the Gospel of Work." Next she turns to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, which finds inspiration especially in Sand's texts. Both authors "illuminate the unnatural schism between body and soul" and both find eventual resolution as their female artists are able to unite art and love. Chapter four moves to George Eliot and what Lewis calls her "Erinna complex" —the fear of female silencing. Focusing specifically on "Mr. GilfiTs Love Story" and Daniel Deronda, she argues that Eliot's woman of genius "is influenced by Staël, Sand, and Barrett Browning and that through her six women artists and would-be artists ... Eliot treats her own ultimate nightmare" as these women are silenced by "miscalculation, fear, loss of their gift, and premature death." In the final chapter, Lewis argues Mrs. Humphry Ward "pays homage to her literary matriarchs, the two Georges," but that she "disposes of her heroines in conventional outcomes when the myth she has invoked [here the Medusa myth] becomes too powerful for her own conservative response to the New Woman feminism of the Victorian twilight." The book, then, makes a powerful claim for Sand and de Staël as literary foremothers, showing how the British writers looked to them for inspiration and authority. Slinn, E. Warwick. Victorian Poetry as Cultural Critique: The Politics of Performative Language. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. ix +217 pp. $39.50 Working to reverse the marginalization of poetry in cultural studies, Slinn's book uses speech act theory and a linguistically based model of performativity to study five Victorian poems and show how their language of display enacts a cultural critique. Specifically focusing on how each poem dramatizes a fluid mix of identity, power, and ideology, he demonstrates how they also expose the politics of power relationships and how performative language is always connected to the means through which such relationships are enacted. Slinn reads Robert Browning's "The Bishop Orders His Tomb" alongside contemporary Victorian concerns and debate over sepulchral style and the body in death. The formalist qualities of the bishop's speech, which so often conflates the material and spiritual, reveals the space in which metaphysical contradictions are both produced and collapsed. Slinn...