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Captivating and illuminating, Hultgren's discussion of the impact of the Sepoy Rebellion on British consciousness and on writers such as Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins is particularly worthwhile. And those who deprive themselves of Hultgren's observations about Marie Corelli (one of Victoria's favorites)-whose Ardath: The Story of a Dead Self ('a Christian dream vision in a pre-Babylonian civilization') opposes Kipling's depiction of the 'harsh material realities of the British Empire'-will miss an informative, comprehensive, and invigorating account indeed. Summing up: highly recommended. CHOICE

Neil Hultgren calls our attention to a conjunction that is, paradoxically, at once familiar and unnoticed: the conjunction of melodrama and representations of empire in the Victorian period. While much recent work has looked at the proliferation of imperial fiction over the last half of the nineteenth century, none has revealed what Melodramatic Imperial Writing shows us so clearly--that such fictions draw their energy and effectiveness from the conventions of melodrama. More than that: they owe much of their complexity as well as their continuing relevance for later readers to this same source. --Stephen Arata, University of Virginia, author of Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siecle

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Neil Hultgren is an associate professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, where he teaches courses in British literature and Victorian studies. He has written on Wilkie Collins, H. Rider Haggard, and Oscar Wilde, and his articles have appeared in such venues as Literature Compass and Victorians Institute Journal.

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