Description: Victorian Literary Cultures: Studies in Textual Subversion is an anthology featuring leading critical voices, including such figures as Nancy Henry, Julian Wolfreys, Ira Nadel, Joseph Wiesenfarth, and William Baker, among others, as they address ideas of subversion in nineteen...
Brief description: Kenneth Womack is one of the world's foremost writers and thinkers about the Beatles and Professor of English and Popular Music at Monmouth University, USA. He is the author of Living the Beatles Legend: The Untold Story of Mal Evans (2023), John Lennon 1980: The Last Days in the Life (2020), Solid State: The Story of "Abbey Road" and the End of the Beatles (2019), and several other books on the Beatles. He serves as the music culture critic for Salon and has contributed to a host of print and web outlets, including Slate, Billboard, Time, Variety, USA Today, The Guardian, Smithsonian Magazine, The Independent, and NBC News.
Review Quotes: "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 Reviews