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“... The reign of James I has long been considered a period in which patriarchal orthodoxy revived in an especially virulent form to counteract 45 years of female rule. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski quotes King James’s advice to his son to illustrate what she frequently calls the era’s ‘dominant ideology’: Ye are the head, [your Wife] your body; It is your office to command, and hers to obey; but yet with such a sweet harmonie as she should be as ready to obey, as ye to command ...”

“... The English family, it’s thought, did not change rapidly or radically during the early modern period. Most English people in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries lived in what demographers call ‘simple’ households: a married couple, their dependent children and sometimes their servants – a ‘nuclear’ family, in short, rather than a complex or extended one ...”

“... for Foucault over Marx, discourse over class and ideology (the latter again criticised here by Catherine Gallagher as a sort of fetish), metaphors of circulation and exchange – ‘social energies’ – over those of cause and effect, and almost anything over Derrida and the challenge of radical deconstruction, seemed to many to be a rather too ...”

“... and we may well think that they also serve who only sit and sleep. For both Prendergast and Catherine Gallagher, the counterfactual is not any old fantasy but an alarm call for those who have been sleeping too long or too comfortably. There are attractions and risks in reaching for such an instrument. The might-have-been may offer ‘the perfume of ...”

“... drawn by the Victorians themselves.’ This internal dialogue is the central preoccupation of Gallagher, who rightly rejects the idea that texts can usefully be analysed separately from their contemporary context. For her, the alleged defects and ambiguities in Early Victorian industrial novels often originate in the doubt and indecision felt by Early ...”

“... pall on the 18th-century advice to be fruitful and multiply, but that doesn’t go far enough. As Catherine Gallagher has argued, the Essay completely reverses the relationship between the healthy individual body and the body social. Rather than being mutually supportive they are suddenly at odds: the fecund individual body reproduces beyond the ability ...”

“... He calls a book by William A. Cohen ‘by and large appalling tosh’; the critical practice of Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt is, he says, ‘piss-poor’, while the former is so inaccurate (not that Cunningham is without his blunders) that she gives us ‘history as shitty-slop’. Yet he wants readers to be tactful as well as ...”

“... knew the terrible secrets, a new life, albeit sadder and wiser, is possible. In A Spell of Winter, Catherine, the narrator, and her older brother Rob, grow up in the large crumbling country house with their grandfather, assorted housemaids and Miss Gallagher, a prissy governess whom neither can stand, but who suffers ...”

“... head wasn’t just a feature of romantic representations – giving evidence at the Old Bailey, Catherine Mackar, for instance, recalled how she had been ‘going down Long-acre with my basket of oysters upon my head’. Baskets, barrows, donkeys and mules were the tools of the trade, and hawkers saw them also as a trademark: sports days organised by street ...”

“... of the commodity of public sorrow is to be applauded, along with the brilliance of her writing,’ Catherine Taylor wrote in the Telegraph. In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani praised the novel’s ‘extraordinary emotional ballast’, and Claire Messud added that it was ‘a necessary and valuable gift’. But a sentence like ‘Southern California was ...”

“... cultural pre-eminence in Britain and France in the middle of the 18th century. Fortunately, Catherine Gallagher’s account of the emergence at that time of a ‘discourse’ of what she terms ‘fictionality’ is a model of its kind, lucid and challenging in equal measure. Watt’s emphasis was on the novel as realist fiction; ...”

“... schools, his wardrobe from Brooks Brothers, the names of his girlfriends (Sally Hayes, Jane Gallagher), his dream of running off and living in a little cabin in the West, or at the edge of the woods in Massachusetts or Vermont, all say WASP in a voice with no trace of Jewish New York. When Salinger’s mother peppered the young Margaret and her brother ...”