Review

"By examining a wide range of literary works and literary-related activities by women in nineteenth-century Britain, "Colour'd Shadows" shifts the focus of scholarship away from the authority of self representation in determining meaning and onto the site, the method, and the time of manufacture of literary works; in this way, Hoagwood and Ledbetter are able to show that what appears to be transparent in literature (i.e., meaning and content) is in fact part of an illusion created by the processes of commodity production. This study is sure to trouble and enliven literary criticism and open a path to new sorts of materialist literary inquiry."--Daniel P. Watkins, Duquesne University

About the Author

Terence Hoagwood is Professor English at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Prophecy and the Philosophy of Mind: Traditions of Blake and Shelley (1985); Skepticism and Ideology: Shelley's Political Prose and Its Philosophical Context from Bacon to Marx (1988); Secret Affinities (1989); Byron's Dialectic: Skepticism and the Critique of Culture (1993(; A.E. Housman Revisited (1994); Politics, Philosophy, and the Production of Romantic Texts (1996); and editor of ten previously rare books from the Romantic and Victorian periods, including Beachy Head by Charlotte Smith, Sappho and Phaon by Mary Robinson, and Denzil Place by Violet Fane.

Kathryn Ledbetter is Associate Professor of English at Texas State University-San Marcos. Her articles on The Keepsake and other literary annuals appear in various scholarly journals, including Studies in the Literary Imagination, Victorian Poetry, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of American, and Victorian Newsletter. She and Terence Hoagwood produced a facsimile reproduction and introduction of the 1829 Keepsake (1999). They also edited, with Martin Matthew Jacobsen, "L. E. L.'s 'Verses' and The Keepsake of 1829," a hypertext edition of three Keepsake poems (and commentary).