Outstanding Academic Titles 2024: English Literature

Enjoy this week's Outstanding Academic Titles list snippet: Five titles pertaining to English literature

Posted on April 16, 2025 in Outstanding Academic Titles

Enjoy these five selections from the Choice Reviews 2024 Outstanding Academic Titles list. This week, we highlight Outstanding Academic Titles focused on English literature. A hearty congratulations to the winning authors, editors, and publishers!

1. My dark room: spaces of the inner self in eighteenth-century England
Park, Julie. Chicago, 2023

The controlling metaphor of Park’s stunningly original argument is the camera obscura, the dark room within which one stands and views external reality as it is transfigured by the space in which it is projected and by the imagination of the individual who perceives it in this space. By this means, external reality becomes a part of what Park (Penn State Univ.) terms the “possessive individuality” that defines not only the 18th-century novel but also 18th-century material culture as a whole. The literary texts examined include Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House,” Cavendish’s Sociable Letters, Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard,” Richardson’s Pamela, and Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, linked respectively to the English country house, the closet, the grotto, the detachable pocket of women’s dress, and the folly—all of which serve to illustrate that the individual’s response to external stimuli transforms both the perceiving subject and the object of perception. Park references paintings, letters, furniture, gardens, collectibles, and other aspects of 18th-century material life to bolster her claim that the dark rooms of the period were the spaces in which the individual’s imagination claimed authority over self and experience. View on Amazon

2. Time and timelessness in Victorian poetry
Huber, Irmtraud. Edinburgh University Press, 2023

This learned and lucid book is a valuable contribution to the literature on genre and Victorian poems, literature that includes Stefanie Markovits’s The Victorian Verse Novel (2017), Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric (CH, Nov’15, 53-1129), Monique Morgan’s Narrative Means, Lyric Ends (CH, May’10, 47-4889), Marion Thain’s The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism (2016), and The Lyric Theory Reader, ed. by Virginia Walker Jackson and Yopie Prins’s (2014). Huber (Univ. of Konstanz, Germany) offers elegant interpretations of Victorian poems, including the most frequently taught works and others chosen wisely.  Huber’s interpretations are cogent, and so are her graceful dissents with other theorists. She situates her arguments about lyric poetry in the context of the transformations of the society to which the poetry responds—socialism, class struggles, urbanization, mechanization, commercializing of time, theories of evolution, secularization, erosion of certainties, the acceleration of time, and relativities everywhere.  View on Amazon

3. The literary criticism of Samuel Johnson: forms of artistry and thought
Smallwood, Philip. Cambridge, 2023

In a brilliant reconsideration of the literary criticism of Samuel Johnson, Smallwood (Birmingham City Univ., UK) argues that affective response, not rational analysis, drove Johnson’s literary pronouncements. As Smallwood thoroughly demonstrates, lived experience—emotional, relational, philosophical, temporal, editorial—is at the heart of Johnson’s critical enterprise. Johnson’s work on Shakespeare and his Lives of the Poets are particularly important texts in Smallwood’s account, but one of the most interesting aspects of the study is Smallwood’s exploration of conversations (some real, some imagined) between Johnson and a host of other writers, from poet David Ferry to Thomas Warton to Montaigne to F. R. Leavis. Johnson’s literary criticism, Smallwood demonstrates, everywhere evidences his experience of compassion and emotion, time and duration, immersion in the vicissitudes of life and awareness of the inevitability of death. Smallwood’s book does full justice to Johnson’s critical acumen; it (perhaps more importantly) exemplifies literary criticism as a creative, deeply human enterprise. View on Amazon

4. The first last man: Mary Shelley and the postapocalyptic imagination
Hunt, Eileen M. Pennsylvania, 2024

Hunt (political science, Univ. of Notre Dame) is unusual, almost unique, in practicing serious literary criticism outside of a literature department. She brings political theory to bear on Mary Shelley in this last installment of a critical trilogy that started with Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child (CH, Jul’18, 55-3919) and was followed by Artificial Life after Frankenstein (2020). The First Last Man is a book about Mary Shelley, COVID-19, and global politics all at once. Though Shelley’s apocalyptic and dystopian novel The Last Man (1826), set in the aftermath of a deadly pandemic, is at the center, the real subject is Shelley’s “plague writing” in general, both public and private, fiction and nonfiction (p. 26). Hunt views The Last Man as a departure from an earlier tradition of plague literature going back to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (which Shelley translated) by depicting a global pandemic, which allowed her to reflect on how cultures respond to traumas partly of their own creation—an echo of Frankenstein. As the daughter of two political philosophers, Shelley was well positioned to muse on these questions. View on Amazon.

5. Selected letters of Wilfred Owen
Potter, Jane. Oxford, 2023

In Selected Letters of Wilfred Owen, Potter (Oxford Brookes Univ., UK) treats readers to a profound journey into the life and mind of one of the most iconic war poets of the 20th century. Drawing from Owen’s correspondence with his mother and others, this compendium traces Owen’s path to becoming a fully developed artist living through one of the world’s worst conflicts. Potter’s expertise in First World War literature and her meticulous curation of Owen’s letters bring forth a deeply intimate and insightful portrait. Potter’s edition deserves a place among the finest works of Owen scholarship. This is a stunning achievement—and a surprising one, too, given the massive number of works that have explored Owen’s life and work previously. View on Amazon.

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