Victorian Literary Cultures

This collection of essays opens with a strong introduction by Womack on the meanings of subversion... Subversiveness seems to be a wide net in which critics are sometimes subversive; at other times authors are subversive or they invoke genres that are already assumed to be subversive. The collection addresses biographical enigmas surrounding the public and private identities of individual writers—for example, Helen Dickens and George Eliot—and offers interpretations of major works by Charlotte Brontë, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, and Bram Stoker. Jeanette Shumaker contributes a cogent essay on the gender connotations of “fallen” ministers such as The Scarlet Letter’s Arthur Dimmesdale, and Womack extends critical interest in the literary impressionism of Heart of Darkness into a thought-provoking examination of ethics via Hans Jauss’s reception theory. Readers will likely appreciate Alexis Weedon’s efforts to link the “cross-media business practices” of early-20th-century publishing to the media convergence model of the 21st century... Summing Up: Recommended...Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * CHOICE *