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  • Ellipsis in English Literature: Signs of Omission by Anne Toner
  • Miguel Tamen
Anne Toner, Ellipsis in English Literature: Signs of Omission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 255 pp.

This book offers a history of English literature under the species of a history of typographical marks of omission. Such marks are ellipsis, editorial or not; dashes, dramatic or otherwise; ellipsis points; stars and asterisks; and a few minor others. The author discusses "early printed drama" (late sixteenth-century translations of Terence, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare); the eighteenth-century novel, non-Gothic (Defoe, Sterne, Richardson, et al.); the Gothic novel (with a backward glance at Chaucer); the nineteenth-century novel (Austen, Eliot, Dickens, Meredith, Collins, et al.); the so-called modernist novel (Conrad, Ford, Woolf); with a passing nod to twentieth-century drama (Pinter, Beckett). There is a considerable amount of erudition; mention is made of grammars. What is remarkable is how much the history offered resembles your average history of English literature: parochial, gentle, and unsurprising; lots of novels and no poetry. One finds the usual periods and epochs; a correct estimation of the importance of English drama; a slightly exaggerated admiration for the pyrotechnics of the eighteenth-century English novel; a fully justified awe for Jane Austen; and a calculated approbation of Virginia Woolf. Thus, one is left with the impression that the book was ultimately not affected by being a study of signs of omission in English literature: under this sort of description, ellipsis in English literature looks exactly like English literature. [End Page 447]

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