1890s Fiction

BOOK REVIEWS could scarcely argue away. StUl, Linda Dowling's toughly argued and richly meditated book must be grappled with, in ways that a brief review can only suggest. Notable as brilliant set-pieces are her reading of the satirical intentions of W. H. Mallock's The New Republic (104-12), and her penetrating interpretation of Pater's "Apollo in Picardy" (138-40)— where she does splendidly catch "the stony exile" that was Pater's fate, while coolly rejecting an influential reading by Dellamora. Her book opens up new perspectives on the real history of same-sex yearning, guilt, and "apology"—in place of the polemics and fantasies of that moment, and the anger and anguish of our own. David J. DeLaura ______________ University of Pennsylvania 1890s Fiction Nikki Lee Manos and Meri-Jane Rochelson, eds. Transforming Genres: New Approaches to British Fiction of the 1890s. New York: St Martin's Press, 1994. xv+ 272 pp. $39.95 THE MOST OBVIOUS DANGER in the compilation of coUections of critical essays is that the contents of the resulting volume may fail to coalesce into any sort of unity. Although every essay in the present collection does indeed focus on the 1890s (straying just into the new century with Kim) and the influence of the New Historicism is here and there apparent, the volume offers Uttle in the way of either an intriguing new approach or perspective. The volume's title is picked up in the editors' introduction: "writers of the 1890^ transformed the genres they inherited to create a body of literature reflective of their day." True enough, but that statement tells us nothing beyond what Holbrook Jackson, Osbert Burdett, and Bernard Muddiman told us some decades ago and on the whole the essays we are given do not focus on the process of transformation. On the other hand, for the most part the essays in Transforming Genres are not only solid but eschew the modish. Perhaps the best of the essays are WilUam J. Scheick's discussion of Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King" as representative of the genre of the "ethical romance," Corinne McCutchan's "Who Is Kim?" and Teresa Mangum's exploration of the way in which the phenomenon of the New Woman and the Decadent became identified by scandaUzed critics despite the great differences not only in the aims but the styles of the writings of these groups. 381 ELT 38:3 1995 Scheick's definition and analysis of the ethical romance is of substantial interest, probably indeed of more interest than the particular application of that category to Kipling's story. As he describes it, the ethical romance has the power "to provoke personal insight and, perhaps , social reformation." McCutchan's reading of Kim, which sees it as based on the four stages of life prescribed by the Hindu precept of the Varnashrama Dharma and Kim's Buddhist lama as a vehicle for stating the necessity of tolerance for all religions, is a fine example of the application of scholarly research to the interpretation of a literary work. Mangum effectively surveys the way Sarah Grand represented the opposition between the agenda of the writers speaking for the New Woman and the Decadent aesthetic in The Beth Book while the ramifications of her argument extend weU beyond that novel. I must add to the list of the most successful of these essays Margaret Diane Stetz's investigation into the experience of women writing in the 1890s. In a straightforward and refreshingly untheoretical way Stetz points out that however typical Gissing's New Grub Street as a depiction of the struggles of male writers, it ignores the rather different situation of women who sought to live by their pens. The essay begins a bit more shrilly perhaps than it need in seeming to denounce those who have seen New Grub Street as accurately representing the life of the average author, but it is nevertheless a very useful corrective which attains a more balanced view by its close. R. B. Kershner's essay on the fiction of Marie Corelli, Claudia Nelson's on the role of sexuality in the late-Victorian Fairy Tale, and Lynne Hapgood's...