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I Précis I Elizabeth Howells University of North Carolina, Greensboro Laura C. Berry. The Child, The State, and The Victorian Novel. Charlottesville : University Press of Virginia, 1999. χ + 199 pp. $39.95 In Berry's estimation, we can understand Victorian literary history better if we recognize the evolution of the narrative of the distressed child. Victorian classics from Dickens's Oliver Twist and Dombey and Son, to the Brontes' Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, to George Eliot's Adam Bede, all reflect a concern with the larger debates about child welfare and the role of the family in contemporary society. During the nineteenth-century private issues had indeed become public, and issues of childhood and family were no exception. These imaginative fictions then are re-viewed as products of the very real public and social debates in medicine, law, charity and social relief about questions of social welfare and modern constructions of the family. This investigation in turn leads Berry to articulate how representations of childhood reflect and then inform understandings of self, subjectivity, and sovereignty : "Portraying the Victorian child as a victim enables the imagining of a version of selfhood in which a subject maybe taken as self-determining and individualized , but inextricably (and simultaneously) dependent upon social formations, especially institutions, outside the self." In this way, understanding the formation of Victorian childhood can allow us to understand the larger issue of Victorian selfhood as well. Barbara J. Black. On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums. Charlottesville : University Press of Virginia, 2000. viii + 242pp. $37.50 We can all quote statistics about the Great Exhibition, but this only scratches the surface of the British obsession with collection and presentation. According to Barbara Black in On Exhibit, understanding the Victorians and their conception of modernity means understanding museums, their history and function. The nineteenth century, among its many other achievements, is the great age of the museum and this discussion begins with the house museum of Sir John Soane, 1837, and concludes with Sigmund Freud's collection-filled study erected in London, 1938. Beyond discussion of specific museum ventures , including the Natural History Museum and South Kensington, Black analyzes the ideology that made them possible by connecting the compilation, organization, and display—activities fundamental to a museum's work—to 379 the literary and imperial imagination of the nation at large. Well researched and well written, supplemented by intriguing figures and photos and an extensive bibliography, this volume is sure to entertain as it informs, rounding out a fundamental moment in the formation of the Victorian cultural identity. Alison A. Case. Plotting Women: Gender and Narration in the Eighteenth - and Nineteenth-Century British Novel. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. ix + 240 pp. $37.50 Combining feminism, narratology, and eighteenth-century studies, in Plotting Women Alison Case offers a new approach to British novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by defining a convention of "feminine narration" whereby the novel's female narrator is excluded from shaping her experience by a male narrator who steps in to provide closure. Case argues that Richardson 's Pamela and Clarissa are the initial foundational texts for this narrative strategy that is then taken up and revised by a long line of popular authors including Smollett, Scott, Charlotte Brontë, Barrett Browning, Dickens, Collins, and Stoker. This new approach allows Case to address the issue of "feminine" storytelling without limiting it to only female narrators. She summarizes her purpose at the end of her introduction: "I want to use the features of feminine narration as a critical tool to help reveal the gender dynamics operating on the level of form in these novels, both individually and in their dialogues with each other. Such dynamics, I suggest, are more hidden and often more recalcitrant than the overt thematics of gender." The engaging, thoughtful prose of this critical analysis offers a new genealogy to consider in the early evolution of the novel. J. R. Hammond. Are H.G. Wells Chronology. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. ν + 171 pp. $65.00 From his 4:30 p.m. birth 21 September 1866 to his death half past that same hour eighty years later on 13 August...

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