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(p. 119). To the reader who is made aware of this background, the scene of intimacypresented in Frost at Midnight may now be seen as a public over-writing of an alternativeprivate narrative of betrayal and reproach, which challenges the very basis of the home-born Feeling (p. 141).

Part 3 examines the ways in which Lamb, having [come] to terms with the destruction of his early friendship ideals (p. 8), reconstitutes them in Rosamund Gray and John Woodvil ,altering the coded signicance of familiar images to demonstrate how allusion may be usedas a reconciliatory tool (p. 164). Such developments point forward to the familiar, allusivestyle of Lambs persona in the writings for which he is best known, his Elia essays.An alternative version of the lyrical man speaking to men, Elia enlists the readers collab-oration in a benevolent community of readers, albeit one which may be realised onlyimaginatively through sympathetic recollection or reading (p. 205). Another reft housejoins those already marking the intertextual landscape: here it is the deserted South SeaHouse, Lambs former workplace transformed into a landscape of remembered affection(p. 204).

As James acknowledges with regret, Mary Lamb remains, for reasons of chronology(p. 212), on the periphery. But James cites existing studies, of Mary Lamb and others, thatcomplement her own work, suggests related topics that merit further attention, and spec-ulates on connections between Lamb and the modern urban perspective as represented byCharles Baudelaire and Virginia Woolf as connoisseurs of a nerie and the reading of mys-terious characters encountered in the streets or discovered by chance in the pages of a bookfrom the old Book stalls (p. 196). Considering Lamb as an important bridge connectingthe sensibility of the nineteenth century to modern urban modes of encounter is just oneof several ways in which Lambs interest in the home-born Feeling of the personalattachment, so deeply rooted in the ideals of the 1790s, can be suggestively mapped ontoa much wider literary and social scene. Future study prompted by Jamess work promisesto open onto wider meanings (p. 214), as this admirable and inspiring book has alreadybrilliantly succeeded in doing.

ALISON HICKEY Wellesley Collegedoi:10.1093/res/hgp091

Advance Access published on 25 October 2009

JED DEPPMAN . Trying to Think with Emily Dickinson. Pp. ix+ 278. Amherst,Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008. Paper, 25.50.

Trying to Think with Emily Dickinson is a thoroughly engaging book which argues thatDickinson is a valuable interlocutor and companion thinker for postmodernity and that herwriting is an early, intense response to the fragmenting epistemological condi-tions . . . attending the weakening of authoritative Western narratives of history, God,nature, the self (p. 7). Deppman characterises Dickinson as a conversational poet whosepoems invite us to converse rather than simply to agree or disagree with them. Her poemsare conversationally experimental: they ask questions, hypothesise, present, test, and

extend observations in the conned times and spaces of the short lyric (p. 17). Thepoems are propositional, indices of her willingness to share her best thinking on eventhe most private emotional or mental experience and the truth that emerges from read-ing such poems is never a xed position but always a singular event of shared thought(pp.1617). Deppman also argues that she invented the important lyrical subgenre, the

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lexicographical impulses and forms that Dickinson shared with her cultureaphorisms,truisms, proverbs, axioms, maxims, epigrams, adages, sayings, etc. (p. 124). Chapter 5Through the Dark Sod: Trying to Read with Emily Dickinson presents brilliant analysesof literal scenes of reading in The Mill on the Floss, Jane Eyre and Aurora Leigh , arguingthat the concerns of these novels suggest that Dickinsons poems were not only self-interpretations but also contributions to wider cultural conversations (p. 158).

In the concluding chapter With Bolder Playmates Straying: Dickinson Thinking of Death, Deppman examines how Dickinson used lyric poetry to pursue difcult projectsof thought through an extraordinary analysis of Fr1588 Of Death I try to think like this.Deppmans view of Dickinsons poems as philosophical conversation is a great model forher poetry and Deppmans philosophical conversations with Dickinsons poems provide thebest model we have of precisely how the poems work and how we might best think aboutthe genre of her poems. His book gives life to Lavinia Dickinsons characterisation of hersister: She had to think and she was the only one of us who had that to do.

JOAN KI RKBY Macquarie Universitydoi:10.1093/res/hgp103

Advance Access published on 21 October 2009

KATHERINE ISOBEL BAXTER and RICHARD J . HAND (eds). Joseph Conrad and thePerforming Arts. Pp. viii + 166. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Cloth, 55.

Now and then there are . . . readings where the knowledge that we shall know the writingdifferently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, orhow. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never beforeseen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we thereaders, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we havenow for the rst time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge (A.S. Byatt,Possession, pp. 4712).

Much of a readers pleasure in perusing Joseph Conrad and the Performing Arts derivesfrom the sort of metactional recognition playfully but seriously described above. Each of the eight essays in this new collection addresses familiar elements in Conrads ction: itscontestation of the stereotypes of Victorian adventure writing, its challenging of the author-

ity of the Western imperialist, its explorations of cultural alterity, its deployment of popularperformance, including commedia dellarte, its translation into ction of stage and screenconventions, its reliance on spectatorship in organising narrative, its pervasive depictions of light and dark, its ambivalent presentation of romance tropes, and its digressions intomelodramatic and operatic modes. All these aspects of Conrads ction are familiar to hisreaders. But in this collection they are given new life by the range and sophistication of scholarly, textual, and theoretical insights offered by the authors. These link Conradsinterest in the performing arts both to postcolonialism and to postmodernism.

In Performing Malaya Linda Dryden makes use of Clifford Geertzs notion of culture asperformance, showing how in the Malay ctions imperialist adventurers [perform] indi-

vidual self-fashionings which derive from their cultures superiority. For instance, Mrs.Travers in The Rescue both aestheticises and appropriates the Other through the role-playing of wearing native dress, while in Lord Jim Jims uniform enacts his cultural supe-riority to the people of Patusan (perhaps a point to add here would be that Conrad ironises Jims sartorial self-presentation by inaugurating his arrival in Patusan with a leap over mud,

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