Kari Nixon’s monograph has the distinction of being a book about reacting to pandemics written and published right before the worldwide outbreak of COVID-19, thus challenging so much of our knowledge about the public and disease. While a fascinating study in nineteenth-century attitudes toward germ theory and contagion, the book is also interesting from a predictive standpoint as it addresses many of the controversies about protection and personal risk that have come to dominate current public discourse. Nixon’s book highlights the ways in which nineteenth-century authors defy principles of isolation from contagion and how fiction “subverts germ theory specifically and unmitigated scientific authority more generally by defiantly and consistently illustrating intimate relationships as fruitful and meaningful in spite of—and sometimes because of—infectious contact” (5). The idea of sanitization becomes connected to the antibiotic, a process that renders matter lifeless, and thus circulation is both proper and necessary for healthy human interaction and community.Nixon’s analysis ranges freely between scientific theory and literary fiction as well as across time periods in the nineteenth century. She organizes her chapters around specific diseases, which allows her to illustrate how each infection, from plague to venereal disease, becomes a vehicle for discussing the relationship between selfhood and society. Her work coverers an array of prominent nineteenth-century writers and offers new readings of works by Daniel Defoe, Mary Shelley, Henry James, Charlotte Brontë, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Henrik Ibsen, Thomas Hardy, and Grant Allen, among others. The breadth of the works covered allows Nixon to develop her analysis of how authors use contagion as a metaphor for social ills, from stopping the circulation of trade to the isolation of Victorian women and the constraints of nineteenth-century morality. Nixon reads against the grain of seeing those who treat illness through containment and sterilization as heroes and instead shows that in fiction these characters often foster the metaphoric ills of society through their unwillingness to participate in the wider community.Nixon’s arguments are especially compelling when she unpacks texts that have been traditionally seen as enforcing the status quo of the scientific savior. Her reading of Ibsen’s Ghosts, for example, provides an intriguing reexamination of the idea that the protagonist, Stockmann, saves the people of the town by shutting down the local baths after discovering bacteria in the water. Instead, Nixon asks us to examine the shaky evidence Stockmann provides, which indicates that a hero complex rather than a scientific certainty may be driving his actions. As she notes, while literary critics today are likely to read the play as the triumph of ignorance over science (the townspeople drive Stockmann away after his revelation), the Victorians would be more likely to take a satirical view of the scientist’s extremism. Such readings ask us to remove our typical associations with science as irrevocable truth and ask us to consider the alternative possibilities, that extreme measures of protection may cause more harm than good.While many of the readings provide a fresh approach to popular texts or an examination of overlooked ones, the sheer mass of readings can leave the project feeling uneven. Some sections, such as the reading of Jane Eyre, seem more perfunctory and would have benefited from a lengthier focus. Nevertheless, Nixon’s monograph will prove to be a great asset to scholars considering the literary implications of nineteenth-century medicine as well as challenging our understanding of canonical Victorian authors. As her premise indicates, by connecting authors who often are quarantined into separate critical traditions, such as Hardy and Ibsen, we do not spread infection but instead circulate ideas more widely, promoting a more creative and dynamic critical environment and avoiding the lifeless inertia that can bedevil scholarship.Of course, Nixon’s focus on the necessity of social interaction despite the risk of contagion seems problematic during our current moment in history. Nixon herself addresses concerns that avoiding the decontamination protocols that create “imagined membranous bubbles of safety” (214) is resonant of the contemporary antivaccination movement. As she notes, denying basic preventive measures is a perverse twist on the idea of protecting the individual without disregarding the needs of the community. Such individuals believe that they “can live safely in the epicenter of a somehow privileged, purified world, while sickened individuals are shuffled to its margins. . . . There is something rather antisocial in the sense that one can live within a population and not be affected by its endemic pathogens” (217). Thus, Nixon’s inquiry into disease and isolation is perhaps the most exciting result of her research, asking as it does for us to consider our connection to contamination and community and how infection can make us reexamine what we owe to each other.

Ross’s monograph makes a compelling argument for the role of literary studies in what is often seen as a largely scientific concept: the Anthropocene, or the period where the actions of humans made such unalterable changes to the geosphere that we are now living in an “age of humans” (9). Members of the scientific community have looked for “golden spikes,” moments where humanity has moved the natural world to a climactic tipping point. For Ross, the exploration of the Anthropocene is enriched by literary scholarship where “humanists have the power of analyzing the role that language plays in making these evaluations and articulating it to others … to understand climate change and other forms of ecological devastation as narrative devices—as structuring agents and stylistic tropes—rather than solely as themes, images, or passive historical contexts” (299–300). To that end, Ross provides a detailed reading of three of Charlotte Brontë’s major...

Netflix’s popular science fiction series The Umbrella Academy raises new questions about how the familiar trope of the ape-man has been adapted for a contemporary audience. Tracing the figure of the ape-man through representative works of nineteenth-century science fiction—Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes—shows that the character has often been used to interrogate ideas of race, gender, and power across the Victorian age. More than just a stand-in for nineteenth-century evolutionary debates, the figure of the ape-man reflects cultural ideas about the relationship between humans and their “animal instincts,” constantly questioning what sets humans apart in the hierarchy of animals.

As for many of us, the COVID-19 pandemic sent shockwaves through my daily routine, introducing new challenges as my colleagues and I rapidly moved our course content online and weathered a seemingly endless daily set of updates and uncertainty. As a faculty member at an HBCU in the South, I was keenly aware of the issues of accessibility, communication, and contact that made my students even more vulnerable to the sudden and inevitable changes occurring. We felt suddenly cast adrift from one another, never more desperate for connection yet seemingly never more alone as we struggled to navigate Canvas, Zoom, and a host of other rapidly essential technologies. In retrospect, I should have been less surprised by the emotional reaction to academic loneliness. After all, my research pursuits have been focused on shipwreck narratives of the nineteenth-century British Pacific. I specialize in examining individuals whose lives are suddenly severed from the comforts of society. Yet it wasn’t until after the triage of the spring semester that I felt able to breath, refocus, and consider how that research leant insight into the trauma of a school year disrupted by pandemic. Shipwreck narratives, like all genres, have distinct narrative patterns, beginning of course with the unexpected collapse of the main characters’ expectations. Intriguingly most shipwreck stories spend little, if any, time describing the actual wreck. Robinson Crusoe, the story most ingrained in the nineteenth-century adventure imagination, spends almost thirty pages describing Crusoe’s early life, but only a few sentences on the catastrophe that forms the main episode of the novel. Crusoe’s immediate reflection is not upon the condition of the ship or the cause of the wreck, but the unexpected nature of the calamity. He remarks, “It is not easy for one, who has not been in the like Condition, to describe or conceive the Consternation of Men in such Circumstances; we knew nothing where we were, or upon what Land it was we were driven” (Defoe 2007, 38). For Crusoe, the shipwreck cannot be fully described because its hallmarks are suddenness, violence, and disorientation. This tradition continues across nineteenth-century retellings of shipwrecks from Johann Wyss to R.M. Ballantyne to Jules Verne to H.G. Wells. It also keenly applies to our ability to explain how the COVID crisis affected the academy. While there were signs, the rising waves and ominous clouds are joined (one description of what was happening in the news), the full impact of what we were to face still seemed swift and stunning; we braced for impact but not devastation.

Many literary critics have dismissed R. M. Ballantyne’s fictions as artless evangelical propaganda. However, such a blanket denunciation fails to consider both the complexity of Ballantyne’s position in a fractured Scottish church and the ongoing debates among church members and elders about the purpose of and policies regarding foreign mission efforts. Using Jarwin and Cuffy (1878), I argue that Ballantyne’s fiction explores tensions as to the nature of personal salvation, the role of the Scottish church in missionary endeavours, and the necessity of an external presentation of the acceptance of the gospel, essential to much Pacific missionary writing. While Ballantyne is often remembered as having written stories which reinforce the dominant ideals of British colonialism and evangelical Protestantism, we must remember that these ideologies were far from stable concepts.

While Victorian women sought new forms of professionalization in teaching, the idea of the female teacher was often paradoxically related to women’s traditional role as mother. Motherhood was seen as an essential element for the compassionate female teacher; and yet, teaching careers prevented women from becoming wives and mothers. By comparing depictions of female educators, education, and motherhood in The Odd Women and The Woman Who Did, as well as exploring historical sources on women’s education, this article shows how British women continually fought to expand their educational opportunities but were paradoxically constrained by their traditional positions as mother / teachers.

Background Sinonasal malignancies with skull base involvement, although rare, carry significant morbidity and mortality. There is a paucity of literature regarding the demographic and socioeconomic profile of these patients and the characteristics of the hospitals in which they are surgically treated. This study utilizes the Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS) to offer contemporary analysis of the demographic, socioeconomic, and hospital characteristics of patients in the United States who undergo surgical procedures addressing sinonasal malignancies with skull base involvement.

Objectives Iatrogenic cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) leaks are now commonly repaired using endoscopic approaches with high success rates. Mucocele formation is a rare complication associated with these repairs. Here, we describe a large iatrogenic ethmoid mucocele, occurring post-CSF leak repair with significant intracranial extension. Salient features of the evaluation, diagnosis, and management are presented with suggestions for prevention.

Reviewed by: Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty by Nathan K. Hensley, and: Settlers, War, and Empire in the Press: Unsettling News in Australia and Britain, 1863–1902 by Sam Hutchinson, and: Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art by Fariha Shaikh Jennifer Fuller (bio) Nathan K. Hensley, Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. xi + 312, $34/£27.99 cloth. Sam Hutchinson, Settlers, War, and Empire in the Press: Unsettling News in Australia and Britain, 1863–1902 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. xi + 288, $109/€103.99 hardcover. Fariha Shaikh, Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), pp. x + 244, $110/£75 hardcover. British rule in the nineteenth century was marked by forays into new lands and territories and inevitable questions about how new citizens should behave as settlers and colonists of these new territories. While Victorians may have viewed their civilization as one of order and progress, many of these interactions were marked instead by violence, confusion, and disorder. These three books each interrogate England's position as a global empire by focusing on the networks of settlers and citizens that wrote visions of civilization on the margins of empire. In different ways, each text explores how these fractured citizens, who viewed themselves as an integral part of the home country yet permanently separated from it, worked to recreate empire to include their own voices. Hensley's Forms of Empire offers the broadest vision of the three, establishing itself as a theoretical framework for reading the contradictions of empire. It takes as its central question the paradox between Victorian ideas of progress and the seemingly inevitable violence inherent in the Victorian state. In order to answer this question, the book analyzes literary objects [End Page 741] that "[reconfigure] the structuring conceptual impasse of liberal modernity," focusing on their unique ability to "generate concepts in excess of the ideological inputs that produced them" (18, 19). The "poetics" in the book's title refers to the ability of such objects to make meaning rather than simply reflect the cultural or political interpretations asserted by literary critics in hindsight. In Hensley's construct, literary objects do not simply reflect history; they actively work to reconfigure it, drawing attention to the critic's role as discoverer, rather than creator, of meaning. This theoretical tension between creating meaning and revealing the critical apparatus used to uncover the meaning already created by literary objects drives the book's primary readings. Forms of Empire reads traditional literary sources in relation to historical and philosophical texts that theorize the contradiction between progress and violence in Victorian culture. In the opening section, Hensley uses George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss to explore a theory of time predicated on catastrophic events. Read in the context of John Stuart Mill's and Henry Sumner Maine's theories of cultural progress and social freedom, Eliot's choice to end the text with a life-destroying flood is not, as Henry James would argue, an unpredictable break in an otherwise continuous text but instead an "uncountable zero-point of a new conceptual-political order, the catastrophic restarting of a world-historical clock" (69). As readers of the text, we conceptualize the event as historians who have survived the violent event, remaking it actively as part of our role as sympathetic viewers of the past and beneficiaries of the new historical time created by it. The second section of the book revolves around Swinburne's poetry and the legal crisis of Morant Bay. The Morant Bay affair revealed a contradiction at the heart of Victorian ideas of law and order. In times of emergency, the state could invoke martial law, exempting the state from the usual legal rules through a system that had to be regulated by the law (in an external sense). Thus, the need for Victorian order allowed for law outside the law, a system that legitimized violence towards those citizens of the empire for whom legal status was always in flux. Hensley connects this contradiction with Swinburne's poetry, demonstrating how it created a world structured by destruction that...

The final chapter looks at the works of Pacific islanders that were published and circulated by the British press and that have remained almost invisible to literary critics. While influenced and edited by the British, the stories of Lee Boo, Ta’unga, and Queen Emma provide a small glimpse into the ways in which Pacific peoples viewed the British and how the British, in turn, conceived of islanders. The History of Lee Boo, while lacking historical accuracy, presents the islanders as complex individuals unable to be categorized simply as “noble savages” or in need of a superior civilizing force. Instead, Lee Boo shows islanders as having the desire and ability to improve their own societies. Ta’unga’s writings provide a very different perspective on missionary enterprises. While Ta’unga agrees with the Christian missions, his account shows the tensions between understanding and respecting Polynesian traditions and his desire to spread the gospel. Finally, the legend of Queen Emma undermines the British narrative of white male colonial superiority over the islands. With her mixed heritage as well as her gender, Emma flaunted tradition and presented a new vision of agency.

The first monograph to trace the Pacific islands as represented through the lens of British fiction and non-fiction across the long nineteenth century.

Objectives: Non-sellar pituitary tumors are exceedingly rare and are believed to arise from ectopic tissue which persists after involution of the craniopharyngeal duct. We describe a case of a non-sellar pituitary adenoma presenting as a sinonasal mass with skull base erosion and acromegaly.

Introduction : The diversion of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) remains the principal treatment option for patients with normal-pressure hydrocephalus (NPH). External lumbar drain (ELD) and overnight intracranial pressure (ICP) monitoring are popular prognostic tests for differentiating which patients will benefit from shunting. Using the morphological clustering and analysis of continuous intracranial pulse (MOCAIP) algorithm to extract morphological metrics from the overnight ICP signal, we hypothesize that changes in the third peak of the ICP pulse pressure waveform can be used to differentiate ELD responders and nonresponders. Materials and Methods : Our study involved 66 patients (72.2 +/- 9.8 years) undergoing evaluation for possible NPH, which included overnight ICP monitoring and ELD. ELD outcome was based on clinical notes and divided into nonresponders and responders. MOCAIP was used to extract mean ICP, ICP wave amplitude (waveAmp), and a metric derived to study P3 elevation (P3ratio). Results : Of the 66 patients, 7 were classified as nonresponders and 25 as significant responders. The mean ICP and waveAmp did not vary significantly (p = 0.19 and p = 0.41) between the outcome groups; however, the P3ratio did show a significant difference (p = 0.04). Conclusion : Initial results suggest that the P3ratio might be used as a prognostic indicator for ELD outcome.

Objectives: Radiation induced sarcomas of the skull base are extremely rare with only a handful of cases reported in the literature, the vast majority of which are found following radiation to pituitary adenomas. Here, we report two unique cases of radiation induced skull base sarcomas. The first is a fibrosarcoma of the skull base following resection and radiation of an esthesioneuroblastoma and the second is a skull base pleomorphic sarcoma following radiation of a peripheral neural-ectodermal tumor (PNET). We describe the presentation, histology, radiology, treatment, outcomes, and review the literature.