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BOOK REVIEWS the title is included, dates of advertisement of the books, location of copies examined and where available author bibliographies if any. Bindings and their letterings are not noted except on the comparatively few books not included in a series, then in the briefest form and throughout the book prices for the publications are not noted. Turner, the compiler, claims that the book "lists the total output of the firm." True, it provides an almost but not quite complete bibliographical chronicle of 1,070 Scott publications in the main section. Many of these have one or more sublistings recording subsequent impressions with variant imprints, certainly accounting for several hundred more listings . In addition, more than a hundred other titles are recorded in each of two appendices ("Titles Published but Not Seen" and "Titles Announced but Not Published") but with only the slightest explanation of how these lists were determined. Although the books in each list are included in the Title Index, for some unexplained reason the authors' names are omitted from the Author Index. Dealing with such a vast amount of material is almost certain to create problems for the compiler. For example there is no textual commentary nor notation of revisions in subsequent editions and there is seldom any indication of plates of a previous publisher having been used, except when a later edition is indicated in title-page transcription; however this is not always an accurate indication of a previous printing by another publisher, as there are instances of a so-called later "edition" as an actual later impression of one of Scott's own first edition publications. In spite of these occasional defects, which are minor blemishes, and a few insignificant typographical errors, this study is a welcome addition to the Pittsburgh Series in Bibliography and a significant tool available to students of British publishing. It is based on a vast amount of research and is actually a trail blazer, meticulously recording the books issued by the Walter Scott Publishing Company and perhaps will spur similar bibliographical investigations of other late-Victorian and Edwardian publishers. Edwin Gilcher ____________________ Cherry Plain, New York The Irish Experiment Vicki Mahaffey. States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and the Irish Experiment . New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. xx + 276 pp. $59.95 357 ELT 43 : 3 2000 THE SUBJECT of Vicki Mahaffey's States of Desire is the creative interplay of art and personality in the works/lives of Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, and James Joyce. More particularly, Mahaffey explores ways in which these three writers reveal their recognition of and resistance to forms of authority and aesthetic representation that reduce human beings to predictable categories. They do this, she argues, through verbal playfulness and other experimental strategies that maintain the openness and unpredictability of desire. Their language is implicitly political because it focuses on the particularity of experience and thereby challenges abstract formulations of nationality, gender, sexual preference, class status, and the like. In their lives Mahaffey discerns moments of self-recognition that lead to significant changes in their art. Mahaffey bases her case primarily on extensive biographical research , close (deconstructive) readings of the texts, and the antirepresentational theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I tend to be suspicious of theorists who claim to open up literary works in some essential way and, in the process, often close off alternative readings, but Mahaffey uses Deleuze and Guattari judiciously, showing how their reading of desire might be applied to the Irish writers. The works of Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce exemplify what Deleuze and Guattari call a "minor literature," a term that is not evaluative but descriptive; as they use it, it refers to the literature of a minority within a dominant culture (like the Irish within English literary culture) that resists the levelling influence of standard values and meanings. Reading as she does requires that we look for the unexpected, the resistant element. The result is a rich, invigorating exploration of possibilities. A fine example is Mahaffey's reading of Oscar Wilde as a man whose career foundered on an incomplete, overly idealistic, understanding of the relationship between his private and public lives, an understanding that Wilde...

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