Kenneth Womack is professor of English and dean of the Wayne D. McMurray School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Monmouth University. James M. Decker is Professor of English, Humanities, and Language Studies at Illinois Central College.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Subversive Literary Cultures by Kenneth Womack I. Subversive WomenChapter 1: The Mysterious Identity of Helen Dickens, Victorian Novelist by Troy J. BassettChapter 2: Moonrise and the Ascent of Eve, the Woman Titan: Charlotte Brontë’s Epiphanies of the Fourfold Elemental Feminine by Martin BidneyChapter 3: Condoning Adultery: Problems of Marriage and Divorce in George Eliot’s Life and Writing byNancy HenryII. Subversive IdeologiesChapter 4: Unraveling Orientalism: Dawe’s “Yellow and White” by James M. DeckerChapter 5: “A Familiar Kinde of Chastisement”: Fasting in the Nineteenth-Century by Joseph LennonChapter 6: The Effect of Emerging New Media on Book Publishing: Lessons from the Origins ofCrossMedia Storytelling in the Early Twentieth Century for Contemporary Transmedia Researchersby Alexis WeedonChapter 7: “And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth”: Reading LevinasianEthics andLiterary Impressionism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness by Kenneth WomackIII. Subversive GenresChapter 8: “Count Me In”: Comedy in Dracula by Ira B. NadelChapter 9: “The Seasoned Spirit of the Cunning Reader”: The Textual Subversions of The Turn of the Screw by Ruth RobbinsChapter 10: “Fallen” Clergymen: The Wages of Sin in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Charles Reade’sThe Cloister and the Hearth, and Henry Arthur Jones’s Michael and His Lost Angelby Jeanette ShumakerChapter 11: Sherlock Holmes: The Criminal in the Detective by Joseph WiesenfarthIndexAbout the Editors and Contributors

This collection of essays opens with a strong introduction by Womack on the meanings of subversion... Subversiveness seems to be a wide net in which critics are sometimes subversive; at other times authors are subversive or they invoke genres that are already assumed to be subversive. The collection addresses biographical enigmas surrounding the public and private identities of individual writers—for example, Helen Dickens and George Eliot—and offers interpretations of major works by Charlotte Brontë, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, and Bram Stoker. Jeanette Shumaker contributes a cogent essay on the gender connotations of “fallen” ministers such as The Scarlet Letter’s Arthur Dimmesdale, and Womack extends critical interest in the literary impressionism of Heart of Darkness into a thought-provoking examination of ethics via Hans Jauss’s reception theory. Readers will likely appreciate Alexis Weedon’s efforts to link the “cross-media business practices” of early-20th-century publishing to the media convergence model of the 21st century... Summing Up: Recommended...Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.