Précis

I Précis I JlLL MARTYN University of North Carolina, Greensboro Chaudhuri.Brahma, James Mulvihill, Fred Radford, eds. Victorian Database on CD-ROM. Edmondon: University of Alberta, 1997. Institutional price: $995 Annual Renewal: $245 This interdisciplinary database covers more than 61,000 publications from approximately 500 journals from 1970-1995. The database includes entries on Painting, Architecture, Music, Philosophy, Religion, British and Colonial History, Politics, Economics, and Literature. Similarly to most library databases , searches can be made using an author's name, a title, or keywords, as well as through chronological searches. Installation of the disk is fairly simple, and searches take only seconds to complete. However, I would say that unless you have a Pentium computer (I'm using a 486 with 20 megs of memory) and some knowledge of data retrieval systems, you will be frustrated by some the cryptic search instructions. I also wonder how a database of this scope and size would be necessary, given the information available through library search systems and on the internet. The price seems a little steep for publication information that one could dig up with just a modicum of elbow grease. Cook, E. T. and Alexander Wedderburn, eds. The Works of John Ruskin on CD-ROM. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. $750 The time has come, and maybe passed, to make room in your library for a computer. CUP has moved the "Library Edition" of The Works of John Ruskin into the twenty-first century. All thirty-nine volumes, including images, have been reproduced in this full-text database which has been designed to follow the text, running-head, foot-noting, and paragraphing of the original volumes exactly. The program is easy to install, and though conducting searches can be somewhat daunting, CUP has enclosed a booklet of straightforward directions . The CD-ROM takes up a fair amount of memory and and disk space on a computer, and it still runs slowly on a 486 with 20 megs of memory, pausing whenever I tried to page down or open a new window. Compared to leafing through volume after volume of text, however, learning to run various queries and searches and waiting for the database to work its magic still promises to save an extraordinary amount of time and effort. 253 ELT 41 : 2 1998 Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. The English Novel in History: 1840-1895. New York: Routledge, 1997. 246 pp. Cloth $65.95 Paper $18.95 One of a series of works entitled "The Novel in History" edited by Gillian Beer, this book takes a multidisciplinary look at literary history. Drawing from recent narrative theory, Ermarth demonstrates how the fiction of the day, when placed in the context of painting, science, religion, and political and economic studies, reflected and affected contemporary opinion. Ermarth uses a range of well-known nineteenth-century novels as her sources to "radically challenge the development model of English Literature." McCready, Sam. A William Butler Yeats Encyclopedia. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997. 512 pp. $95.00 Yeats was much more than an accomplished and prolific poet. This beautifully bound book is a tribute to his active literary, social, and political life in Ireland and beyond. McCready, who claims to have made Yeats "a lifetime study," has organized a significant amount of useful biographical information into one volume. The encyclopedia includes roughly 1000 alphabetically arranged, comprehensive entries on Yeats's various plays and publications, his fictional characters, mythological references, organizations to which he belonged, places he lived and visited, and people he knew and/or wrote about. Each entry includes cross-references, and most list suggestions for further reading. The volume also has a chronology of Yeats's life and work and a selected, general bibliography of primary and secondary sources. Given the many hats Yeats wore in his lifetime and the ever-growing amount of critical writing on his work, McCready's reference book seems a worthy acquisition for the Yeats scholar or for any serious fan. Mitchell, Sally. Daily Life in Victorian England. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996. xv+ 311 pp. $45.00 One of a series of books entitled "Daily Life Through History" published by Greenwood Press, this volume draws from current scholarship to present...