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Narrative Bonds: Multiple Narrators in the Victorian Novel, by Alexandra Valint; pp. vii + 208. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2021, $79.95, $29.95 paper. The formal narration of the [...]

Student frustration with the level and content of feedback is well-noted, especially in relation to new or unfamiliar assessment types. At the same time, students are often unlikely to engage with marking and feedback processes, including the use of rubrics or marking criteria before submission. The aim of this project was to build students' assessment and feedback literacy through engagement sessions both before and after submission in two departments at a UK university. Following discussions with students on their perceptions of feedback, assessment-specific marking criteria were developed. Students were provided with an opportunity to discuss these criteria and assess exemplars before submission and then, after return of marks, discussed the helpfulness of the feedback provided. Feedback Studio® was used to provide electronic feedback via comment libraries, general comments and qualitative rubrics. Both staff and students found that the combination of engagement sessions and online feedback was a positive improvement, although questions were raised about the timing and frequency of engagement sessions and students' ability to apply marking criteria to their own work. The conclusions summarise recommendations for the use of timetabled engagement sessions to support students in the use of assessment-specific marking criteria.

In Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey (1847), the eponymous narrator uses a range of ecological metaphors to make sense of her interactions with others. She likens governessing to domestic horticulture and envisions how her task of educating children will be "to train the tender plants, and watch their buds unfolding day by day." Rather than voice her unfulfilled romantic feelings for Weston or consciously work through her self-doubts about physical appearance, she visualizes them both as insects: she is the "humble glow-worm" who, without a "power of giving light" (i.e., beauty), "the roving fly might pass her ... a thousand times, and never light beside her" (123). Even the reader, in the opening sentence, assumes the role of active participant: a nucivorous beast hunting for whatever "dry, shriveled kernel" of narrative meaning might be found by "cracking the nut" (5). As character, the budding naturalist "botanize[s] and entomologize[s] along the green banks and budding hedges"; as narrator, she projects herself and those around her into complex ecosystems (95). Her choice of metaphors captures a matrix of exchanges in which species of all kinds interact with one another and their environments in unpredictable ways. Agnes assigns the life cycles of flora and fauna to characters, populating the novel with human and nonhuman animals in ways that draw heavily on early nineteenth-century science even as they also prefigure some of the concerns of contemporary animal studies and ecocriticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses social upheaval caused in mid-Victorian England by the advent of the railroad excursion train, which caused members of all classes to sit together. The pseudosciences of phrenology and physiognomy came into importance as a way of identifying class. Charles Bennett's book "The Excursion Train" is cited, as expressing anxiety about the effectiveness of this classification. The essay analyzes this anxiety and the perceived threat of railroads to English national identity.