Book Reviews : Civilizations and world systems: studying world-historical change. Edited by Stephen K. Sanderson. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira. 1995. 328 pp. £19.95, cloth; £7.50, paper. ISBN 0 7619 9104 2, cloth; 0 7619 9105 0, paper

Abstract

tarian usurpation of middle-class cultural prerogatives, is the most engaging, especially since the process of acculturation it documents was not just reflected but constructed by popular imagery and its verbal equivalents: the penny novel, penny Shakespeare, penny cyclopaedias, et al. Maidment’s forays into varied subject-matters are linked by his overarching concern with the possible correlation of technique and message. He asks, early on, whether the artist’s process engraving, lithograph, woodcut effects meaning, and develops this question as a leitmotif. Readers probably will agree that nineteenth-century woodcuts more readily bespeak the lowbrow than do contemporaneous etchings, but some will balk at Maidment’s provocative but tenuous claim for ’the close connection between wood engraving and bourgeois values’ (especially given his puzzling tendency to conflate wood engravings and woodcuts). Developed around the turn of the nineteenth century, wood engravings usually appeared in close conjunction with text, since their dimensions were limited by their source (boxwood sawn across the grain). Citing the ’verbalness of Victorian culture’, Maidment indicates that wood engraving’s usual alliance with prose made it the preferred Victorian medium (in contrast to lithography, invented around the same time, but better suited to independent full-sheet renderings than to text-related vignettes). He details the many uses to which illus-