Reviews and Comments on The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins
   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


Copyright (C) Graham Law, 2012-13. All rights reserved.

First drafted Tue 3 April 2012.
Last revised Sat 16 March 2013.