Taylor's Cambridge Companion is a solid volume
with essays by leading Collins scholars. The volume is
organized around two threads: the first half contains
essays with a chronological or generic focus, including
his early writing, shorter fiction, sensation fiction,
detective fiction, and later novels; the essays in the
second half examine Collins's relationship to various
themes such as the literary marketplace, marriage,
masculinity, empire, and disability. Another generic
essay�\on Collins and theater�\and an examination of various
remakes of Collins's works round out the book's second
half. ... The thematically organized essays in the second half of the Companion are far more successful and satisfying. Graham Law's marvelous and eminently readable discussion of the different stages of Collins's publishing career constitutes, as Law puts it, a 'fascinating case study in the sociology of literature in the second half of the nineteenth century' (100) that is sure to interest any Victorianist. The essays by Carolyn Dever on marriage, John Kucich on masculinity, and Lillian Nayder on empire are all excellent, particularly in the way they manage to show Collins's subtlety and power at work in a range of texts, not just in his best-known work. Also exemplary in this regard is Kate Flint's 'Disability and Difference,' which reads Collins's 'abnormal' characters, many of whom are also marked as sexually and racially ambiguous, as his attempt to scrutinize the 'assumptions [that] structure social thinking' (166). Audrey A. Fisch, New York City University Review in Victorian Studies 50:3 (Spring 2008) 495-8 |