{"id":147,"date":"2016-07-03T20:31:19","date_gmt":"2016-07-03T20:31:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=147"},"modified":"2022-06-27T12:35:58","modified_gmt":"2022-06-27T16:35:58","slug":"lesa-scholl-emily-morris-and-sarina-gruver-moore-eds-place-and-progress-in-the-works-of-elizabeth-gaskell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2016\/07\/03\/lesa-scholl-emily-morris-and-sarina-gruver-moore-eds-place-and-progress-in-the-works-of-elizabeth-gaskell\/","title":{"rendered":"Lesa Scholl, Emily Morris, and Sarina Gruver Moore, eds. Place and Progress in the Works of Elizabeth Gaskell"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Lesa Scholl, Emily Morris, and Sarina Gruver Moore, eds. <em>Place and Progress in the Works of Elizabeth Gaskell<\/em>. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. xiii, 231 p. ill. ISBN 9781472429636. UK \u00a360 (hardback).<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The title of this collection of essays places it squarely amidst a tradition of criticism that considers Elizabeth Gaskell in terms of her contribution to regionalist representations of both city and country. The contents of the volume, however, shift critical focus to Gaskell\u2019s representations of blurred boundaries and liminal spaces. Gaskell, the editors contend, uses movement between and within places to think about the possibilities for social, economic, and temporal progress both within and among persons. <!--more-->In this sense, Gaskell is a novelist less of static places than of dynamic places.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The fifteen essays are grouped into four sections: \u201cHome Geographies,\u201d \u201cMobility and Boundaries,\u201d \u201cLiterary and Imagined Spaces,\u201d and \u201cCultural Performance and Visual Spaces.\u201d The finest of these essays offer important contributions to Gaskell criticism by charting unseen connections across persons, spaces, and time. Katherine Inglis, for example, describes in \u201cUnimagined Community and Disease in <em>Ruth<\/em>\u201d how the spread of Typhus undermines distinctions between the pure and the impure, suggesting \u201cthe real interconnectedness and broad scope of a fallen woman\u2019s community\u201d (68). Josie Billington, in \u201cGaskell\u2019s \u2018Rooted\u2019 Prose Realism,\u201d traces the momentary intrusion of past memories and future eventualities\u2014often within parentheses or between dashes\u2014into the persistent present of Gaskell\u2019s realism, and places this approach in the context of other Victorian female writers. While the essays most frequently discuss <em>North and South<\/em>, Gaskell\u2019s novels, short fiction, letters, and even Greek songs, all receive some attention. The approaches to Gaskell\u2019s works represented here are also diverse; essays of general interest to the reader of Gaskell are presented alongside more specialized studies of Gaskell and empire, emigration, ethnography, meteorology, and ekphrasis.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Considering the broad range of methods and perspectives, the view of Gaskell presented in these essays is surprisingly unified. The collection, which originally developed out of a meeting at the British Women Writers\u2019 Conference in 2012, overwhelmingly presents Gaskell as an author who transcends boundaries; Gaskell is, the editors note, \u201cglobal . . . fluid, complex, and open\u201d (3). This point is an important one, but it also means that the limitations of Gaskell\u2019s vision are rarely acknowledged or addressed. Mary Mullen alone, in her essay \u201cIn Search of Shared Time: National Imaginings in Elizabeth Gaskell\u2019s <em>North and South<\/em>,\u201d draws attention to Gaskell\u2019s role in policing certain boundaries, arguing that even as Gaskell represents the diversity of the nation\u2019s present, she pointedly excludes the Irish from her vision of its future. The collection also rarely describes Gaskell in relation to the print culture of the period. Julia M. Chavez, in her essay \u201cReading \u2018An Every-Day Story\u2019 Through Bifocals: Seriality and the Limits of Realism in Elizabeth Gaskell\u2019s <em>Wives and Daughters<\/em>,\u201d offers one exception, reading Gaskell\u2019s serially published novel in its original context in the <em>Cornhill Magazine<\/em>. Further consideration of the print medium as a space of literary engagement would have enhanced the collection\u2019s general aim of demonstrating Gaskell\u2019s engagement with social and political issues of contemporary importance.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">This collection of essays reenergizes critical discussion about Gaskell\u2019s signature emphasis on place by suggesting a wide range of dynamic new approaches to the subject. Far from being a simple observer of city and country, Gaskell, as these contributors show, uses place as a means to illuminate Victorian economic, social, temporal, and personal forms of progress.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\">Laura Forsberg<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\"><em>Concordia University Texas<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lesa Scholl, Emily Morris, and Sarina Gruver Moore, eds. Place and Progress in the Works of Elizabeth Gaskell. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. xiii, 231 p. ill. ISBN 9781472429636. UK \u00a360 (hardback). The title of this collection of essays places it squarely amidst a tradition of criticism that considers Elizabeth Gaskell in terms of her contribution to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":591,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions\/591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}