Jennifer Crane's "'Gifted Children' in Britain and the World"

Jennifer Crane is lecturer in health geographies at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, working at the intersection of history, geography, and sociologies of health. Before joining Bristol, she held teaching and research positions at the Universities of Warwick and Oxford, including being PI on a Wellcome Research Fellowship. She has published popular and scholarly works exploring how diverse publics access state welfare, analysing diverse case studies of child welfare, the NHS, and gifted children. Much of her work has employed and driven new analysis of 'experiential expertise', including her first book, Child Protection in England, 1960-2000.

Crane applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Gifted Children in Britain and the World: Elitism and Equality since 1945, with the following results:

I looked to page 99 of my latest book, Gifted Children in Britain and the World, with some trepidation, without a clear sense of what chapter or what kinds of analysis would be there. What we see on this page actually feels, to me, central to the ethos and major claims of the final book – the page focuses on making visible and analysing the writings of children and young people themselves. Page 99 discusses a collective letter, written in 1979 by a group of ‘ninth and tenth graders’ in a giftedness programme in California, where, as you’ll see elsewhere in this book, such programmes were relatively prevalent. The ninth and tenth graders wrote to young people who read a British magazine, Explorers Unlimited, produced for child-members of a voluntary group, the National Association for Gifted Children. The ninth and tenth graders reached out, in particular, to share critique of the term, ‘gifted’. They wrote that, having received this label, they were ‘expected to always be straight A or on top’, and ‘push[ed] harder’ by teachers; they could also not always ‘live up to your expectations’. Instead, the children wrote, they’d like to simply be analysed and approached as ‘’human’, and understood ‘a little more’.

This letter, my page 99 argues, shows the ambivalence which many young people felt about the label gifted. And this specific letter, the next Explorers Unlimited edition recorded, merited many responses, with British children agreeing that ‘we are given a label’ and that ‘I felt just like that towards my parents’. The label then travelled, and held similar meanings for children across the Atlantic, despite very different political economy structuring around ‘giftedness’ (also discussed in the book). Some children, discussed elsewhere in the book, of course also loved the label ‘gifted’. Many children relished a sense of specialness attached to it, and in the 1970s and 1980s in particular, when ‘giftedness’ was typically taken very narrowly, to really mean rare, exceptional, special, children mobilised this label to reshape their relationships with teachers, friends, parents, and siblings. Yet other children found the pressure of the label too much, and questioned the arbitrariness of its application and also, significantly, the inequalities embedded in psychological and educational testing, which are also explored in this book. More children still felt ambivalent about this label – these mixed feelings are something that one of my PhD students, Buse Demirkan, is tracing at present through interviews.

Overall then, my book contributes to geographies and histories of childhood by arguing, foundationally, that we can and must trace the voices of the young and include these, and ‘age’ more broadly, as a critical category within our analyses. We can dismiss any claims that the young didn’t have political agency, or that their writings were never saved or recorded, and thus that their stories do not matter or can’t be accessed. With this in mind, the book traces the rise and fall of giftedness as a specific label, and the broadening out of this idea, with new connections to social mobility agendas, in the 1990s and 2000s. And central to the book is the complex ‘agencies’ exercised by young people – both empowered by ideas of their high intelligence, able to access new voluntary spaces, yet also inevitably entwined policy agendas around future leadership and, often, dismissed as critical thinkers with the assumption that any critique merely demonstrated the uniquely disruptive nature of their minds.

Learn more about 'Gifted Children' in Britain and the World at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Eva Leach and Jonathan Morton's "Performing Desire"

Elizabeth Eva Leach is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford and the author of Guillaume de Machaut, Sung Birds, and Medieval Sex Lives. Jonathan Morton is Associate Professor of French at Tulane University and the author of The "Roman de la rose" in Its Philosophical Context.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Performing Desire: Knowledge, Self, and Other in Richard de Fournival's "Bestiaire d'amours", and reported the following:

On page 99, the discussion moves between two of the animal examples from Richard de Fournival’s darkly playful thirteenth-century fiction, the Bestiaire d’amours—those of the eagle and the woodpecker. The first-person speaker in the work, whom we call the je (the “I”), uses the eagle breaking its beak to eat as a twisted analogy for the lady needing to break her pride (figured as a “fortress”) to speak and accept the advances of the je. He then describes the woodpecker’s behaviour when a hunter stops up its nest hole with a plug or peg. The bird finds a special herb that has the power to unfasten the plug, allowing it to access its offspring. The je uses this story to figure his own desire to access the lady’s heart, lamenting that he doesn’t possess the “herb” needed to open her up. We read the je’s interpretation as a deliberate but transparent attempt to misdirect the audience of the work away from the clear implication of his own desire to penetrate her, both psychically and physically. This imagery contributes to a sequence of suggestive examples on this page, highlighting themes of penetration and lightly veiled obscenity and potential violence.

This page, nestled within the chapter on “The Place of Bodies,” offers a vivid picture of the complex and often unsettling psychic world conjured up in Richard de Fournival’s prose work. On page 99, we discuss how the Bestiaire d’amours uses animal examples to explore themes of penetration, breaking down barriers, and gaining access to the desired other. This single page represents the whole book in a few ways. It captures the Bestiaire d’amours’s distinctive method of being a warped kind of bestiary, of using animal natures for self-serving analogies. It showcases one of the book’s major lines of argument, namely that the Bestiaire d’amours conceptualises desire and subjectivity through images of containment, entry, and rupture. The overtones of obscenity and the je’s manipulative interpretations, crucial aspects of the work’s unsettling effect, are also clearly visible here.

Of course, page 99 doesn’t tell the whole story. It doesn’t delve into the work’s status as a hybrid “prose lyric”, the subtle games it plays with performance and textuality, the subversiveness with which it parodies authoritative philosophical, Scholastic discourse, or its rich reception history, all things treated in the book as whole. Nevertheless, page 99 offers a glimpse of how the Bestiaire d’amours uniquely (and often disturbingly) uses animal imagery to explore the physical and psychological dimensions of desire.

Learn more about Performing Desire at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Medieval Sex Lives: The Sounds of Courtly Intimacy on the Francophone Borders by Elizabeth Eva Leach.

--Marshal Zeringue

Josée Johnston, Shyon Baumann, Emily Huddart, and Merin Oleschuk's "Happy Meat"

Josée Johnston is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on food, gender, culture, and politics. She is the co-author, with Shyon Baumann, of Foodies (2015) and, with Kate Cairns, of Food and Femininity (2015). Shyon Baumann is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. His work addresses questions of evaluation, legitimacy, status, classification, and inequality. Past book projects include Hollywood Highbrow (2007). Emily Huddart is Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. She is an environmental sociologist with a focus on consumer attitudes and behaviors. She is the author of Eco-Types (2022). Merin Oleschuk is Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Happy Meat: The Sadness and Joy of a Paradoxical Idea, and shared the following:

Page 99 of our book falls in the chapter "Happy Meat Makes Me Feel Good," which explores the happy stories about ethical meat that some consumers focus on when thinking about their meat consumption choices. On page 99 specifically, there is an anecdote from two focus group interviewees about a pig slaughtering they witnessed. The interviewees explained that the event caused them to be especially attuned to the conditions under which animals are raised and killed and to consume mindfully. We argue that this anecdote illustrates psychologist Paul Rozin's idea that meat has become moralized, which is to say that meat consumption was previously morally neutral but has in recent decades come to be seen as having clear moral consequences. We argue also that this anecdote illustrates Sara Ahmed's argument that happiness can be ascribed to an object, which then has enhanced positive social valuation.

Readers turning to this page would learn something significant about our book, but it would be a limited window into what the whole book is about. The book covers many more concepts, arguments, and empirical findings. At the same time, the ideas of moralization and happy objects are two of the most important concepts in the book. In trying to understand why people eat meat, and why happy meat in particular, we find that happy meat helps to manage people's moral qualms about meat. Happy meat is morally acceptable because the animals are treated humanely. Animals raised ethically are objectified as highly valued and they can generate happiness via consumption. These are some of the core ideas underlying why happy meat works well for some consumers to continue to eat meat. It would seem that the Page 99 Test does not work quite as well for our book as might be hoped, but it's also not a total failure.

Our book is perhaps less well suited to the Page 99 Test than many others. It is less about advancing a single argument and is more about examining the multiple angles for understanding happy meat as a consumer phenomenon and in relation to meat eating in general. So it is not surprising that page 99 does not tell us about much of the book as a whole. While page 99 draws on a focus group transcript, the book also relies on survey data, interviews and site visits with farmers, and analysis of news stories. The other themes the book addresses include the emergence of a discursive and material "space" for happy meat aside from the industrial meat system; the meat consumption behaviours and beliefs of the average consumer; the perspectives and experiences of farmers and other workers who produce happy meat; and the social dynamics implicated in the choice to eat, or not eat, happy meat vs. industrial meat.

Learn more about Happy Meat at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Niall Docherty's "Healthy Users"

Niall Docherty is a Lecturer in Data, AI, and Society in the Information School at the University of Sheffield.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Healthy Users: The Governance of Well-Being on Social Media, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Healthy Users explores the hidden political costs of nudge, discussing how its paternalistic interventions manipulate the free choice of (assumed-to-be) irrational individuals living in neoliberal societies. Page 99 characterizes nudge as a system of control, despite its proponents arguing that it ensures the autonomy of people subject to its techniques. By subtly shaping environments, through design cues that range from house flies on urinals or default options on administration forms, ‘choice-architects’ direct human thought and behaviour in certain directions, at the expense of others. The book as a whole explores the effects of this in the context of social media interfaces, arguing that the type of agency afforded to users is incredibly narrow, primarily reflective of normative Silicon Valley values to do with self-interest, self-promotion and social competition. The book argues that to engage with social media is to respond to and action these values. To be a user in the terms offered by platforms is to live the neoliberal dream of nudge. A reader opening the book on page 99 would likely get a sense of these arguments, yet may miss how the book also relates these norms to the economic practices of platforms who are keen to keep users scrolling for a primary capitalist function. That is, despite platforms claiming that the design of their interfaces encourage healthy use, meaningful connection, and social flourishing, they also cultivate habitual interactions and dependencies. It is through these repeated, daily user habits that platforms are able harvest profitable data, which is then used to improve their services and sell to interested third parties for a profit - mainly for targeted digital advertising. Habits, therefore, as the book explores in some depth through a range of empirical and theoretical analysis, are the vehicle of users' own normalization and the principal source of capitalist value extraction online today. Overall, then, I think page 99 of Healthy Users reveals some of the core philosophical ground of this critique, but omits its corresponding technological, and deeply contemporary, applications found throughout the book as a whole.

Learn more about Healthy Users at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eunji Kim's "The American Mirage"

Eunji Kim is an assistant professor of political science at Columbia University.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The American Mirage: How Reality TV Upholds the Myth of Meritocracy, with the following results:

Page 99 of The American Mirage zooms in on the idea of a “natural experiment,” a term social scientists use to describe those rare moments when life, not a researcher, does the randomizing. The page opens with this explanation:

It’s as if an experiment has taken place but without any deliberate randomization by researchers.

From there, I walk readers through a well-known example: the rollout of Fox News across the U.S. in the late 1990s. Because cable providers negotiated channel availability district by district, some Americans got Fox News early, others didn’t—randomly, and for reasons that had nothing to do with politics. That quirk gave researchers a way to study the channel’s effects on voting behavior, ideology, and even how members of Congress talked. Later on the page, I mention another stroke of research luck: how state regulations accidentally determined which towns got early broadband access—giving us a window into how online media deepened partisan divides.

Does page 99 reflect the book as a whole?

Honestly? It does more than I expected. At first glance, it might seem like I’ve gone full research nerd (and fair warning, I do love a clever research design). But this page also sets the stage for one of the book’s central moves: showing how entertainment—often brushed off as frivolous—can shape political beliefs in very real, very measurable ways.

Just a few pages later, I introduce my own natural experiment, one that might surprise readers: the hometown locations of successful American Idol contestants. What happens when someone from your small town suddenly becomes famous on national TV? It turns out that people in those towns watch more of that TV show and then start to believe in the American Dream more strongly. They’re more optimistic about economic mobility compared to their similar counterparts who live in otherwise economically similar towns. Page 99 is the bridge between the methodological rigor of social science and the pop-cultural heartbeat of the book. It’s the part where I ask readers to take both seriously.

For too long, political scientists have treated entertainment as a sideshow. But if we’re honest about how Americans actually spend their time, the picture is clear: most aren’t glued to political news—they’re immersed in stories that entertain, distract, and inspire. The American Mirage starts from that simple, overdue truth. This book argues that the tales we consume—from reality TV competitions to influencer glow-ups—aren’t just harmless fun. They shape how we think about success, who deserves it, and what’s possible in America. They fuel our belief in mobility even when the odds are stacked. They blur the line between fantasy and political reality. Once upon a time, Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches stories lived in dime novels. Today, they live on glowing screens—and they’re still doing political work. The American Mirage shows how.

Visit Eunji Kim's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gila Stopler's "Women's Rights in Liberal States"

Gila Stopler is Full Professor of Law and former Dean of Law School at the College of Law & Business, Israel. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of Law & Ethics of Human Rights.

Stopler applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Women's Rights in Liberal States: Patriarchy, Liberalism, Religion and the Chimera of Rights, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Women’s Rights in Liberal States says:

The extension of the protection of religious liberty beyond churches to a wide range of organizations with a religious ethos is characteristic of many liberal democracies and is highly significant as far as women's right to equality is concerned. As described above, wide nets of religiously based charitable and educational institutions, many of which are publicly funded, are free to preach and practice discrimination against women behind the protective shield of religious liberty. From emergency rooms in Catholic hospitals that refuse to administer emergency contraception to women, through religious schools that teach school children about women's inferiority, to religious employers who refuse to hire women or who discriminate against them in pay, the liberal democratic state aids, protects, and finances the dissemination of discrimination against women in the interest of protecting religious liberty.

In his study of public religions in the modern world, Casanova posits that there are three levels on which religions can be involved in the public sphere. The first is through its establishment at the state level. The second level is the level of political society, through confessional parties and through the involvement of religious institutions and groups in political and electoral mobilization. The third level is the level of civil society on which religions participate in the public discourse on various issues. Casanova argues that ultimately only at the level of civil society can religions have a legitimate public role, consistent with modern universalistic principles and with differentiated structures. In this Chapter I have shown that in contemporary Western liberal democracies religions have a significant public role on all three levels, which adversely affects the situation of women. I would therefore argue that contrary to common perception religion state relations in liberal democracies pose a serious challenge to women's rights....

Does the Page 99 Test work?

Yes, it does. The crux of the argument in the book, which is reflected very well on page 99, is that Western liberal democracies give patriarchal religions too much power, legitimacy and protection. Patriarchal religions then use their power and legitimacy, and the protection of the state, to restrict the rights of women in both the public and the private spheres and to adversely affect women’s status in society, all with the sanction of the liberal state.

Page 99 is the last page in chapter 3 of the book. While it reflects the crux of the argument in the book, the full argument is more multilayered and complex. The book is divided into three parts. The first part (chapters 1 and 2) discusses the historical, societal, and theoretical roots of discrimination against women. It explains the historical rise of patriarchy through patriarchal religion and culture and shows how patriarchy has been embedded in liberal theory and in the practice of liberal states. The second part of the book (chapters 3 and 4), which includes page 99, explains how, contrary to popular belief, religion state relations in liberal states adversely affect women’s rights. Patriarchal religions are regarded as respectable and as promoting public virtue and moral values regardless of and sometimes because of their discriminatory stances toward women, and the separation between religion and the state which is assumed to protect women against the power of patriarchal religion fails to do so. In part III (chapters 5 and 6) the book discusses the decline of liberal hegemony, the rise of populism, and their effects on the rights of women. Through an analysis of American Supreme Court cases such as Hobby Lobby and Dobbs the book argues that the resurgence and repoliticization of patriarchal religion in the twenty-first century has further magnified the threats facing women’s rights in Western liberal states such as the USA. It argues that the repoliticization of religion in the new millennium is often part and parcel of the rise of nationalism and of right-wing populism, and together these phenomena threaten not only the rights of women, but the future of liberal democracy itself.

Visit Gila Stopler's website.

--Marsha Zeringue

Elisabeth Paling Funk's "The Dutch World of Washington Irving"

Born in the Netherlands, Elisabeth Paling Funk received her PhD from Fordham University, taught English at the university level, and is now a translator, editor, and independent scholar. She lives in the Hudson Valley.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Dutch World of Washington Irving: Knickerbocker's History of New York and the Hudson Valley Folktales, and reported the following:

Serendipitously, page 99 of The Dutch World of Washington Irving: Knickerbocker’s History and the Hudson Valley Folktales opens near the beginning of a section in chapter three, entitled “The Oral Tradition.” This chapter deals with all aspects of New Netherland’s popular culture as Irving blends these within the Knickerbocker History’s narrative, and page 99 gives an excellent example of Irving’s major purpose and his way with Dutch-American folk material. Knickerbocker’s History illustrates Irving’s view that traditions and beliefs constitute an essential part of a people’s history. The stories of the Hudson Valley tales are wholly subservient to his purpose: to describe the distinctive life, traditions, and beliefs within the Dutch-American communities of former New Netherland. My first two chapters complete the picture; they investigate Irving’s treatment of New Netherland’s history and the presence in that work of Jacob Cats, a major seventeenth-century Dutch poet. But popular culture in all its manifestations is an important part of Irving’s History of New York and dominates the Hudson Valley folktales. Long before the study of folklore became a scholarly pursuit, Irving’s description of life in the Hudson Valley made him America’s first folklorist.

“The Oral Tradition” of chapter three treats all folk belief—omens, visions, ghosts, witchcraft, demonism—that are represented in The History of New York, and begins with legendry. Much of page 99 examines Irving’s claim, attributed to Juffredus Petri, that America was settled by “a skaiting party from Friesland.” Petri, or Sjoerd Pieters, a sixteenth-century Frisian scholar who intermingled the fabulous with historical facts, told of Frisian noblemen who, in 1030, discovered the New World and populated Chile. The “skaiting party” is Irving’s fiction, but his choice of activity for such intrepid explorers is apt; through the ages, Frisians have been known as master skaters, whose speed skating skills would become legendary in tales of extraordinary prowess.

A discussion of The Flying Dutchman follows. Irving’s use of this legendary ghost ship in the History’s 1809 edition is among the first in world literature and carries all the major elements of the legend in its oral tradition. He returns to it in the tale, “The Storm Ship,” explored in chapter five.

Next, the Dutch Saint Nicholas in religion, folk belief, and celebration is traced from his origin through the Middle Ages, when he acquired an additional role as folk hero. "The Oral Tradition" then follows him through his fateful adventures during the Reformation to his arrival and continued celebration by the Dutch in the New World. Irving’s adoption and transformation of the Dutch folk hero in his History of New York are extensively analyzed and shown to have developed into today’s American Santa Claus, a process that is further investigated in the epilogue.

Learn more about The Dutch World of Washington Irving at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nathan K. Hensley's "Action without Hope"

Nathan K. Hensley is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University, where he works on nineteenth-century British literature, critical theory, environmental humanities, and the novel. His other areas of research include Anglophone modernism and the cultures of contemporary globalization. His first book, Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (2016), explores how Victorian writers expanded the capacities of literary form to account for the ongoing violence of liberal modernity.

Hensley applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Action without Hope: Victorian Literature after Climate Collapse, with the following results:

Page 99 of Action without Hope comes in the second chapter, which uses Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights to describe the emergence of a modern way of life that's based on a relationship of extraction toward the nonhuman world. With others in the nineteenth century, she witnessed the slow process by which an exploitative and nonregenerative and therefore, in a way, doomed social order came to feel natural. The book as a whole makes the claim that this is the world whose ruins we live in today, "climate change" or the unraveling of earth systems being just one area where the outcome of this orientation is now palpable to us. Anyway in this chapter I'm arguing that Brontë's weird and still challenging novel suggests that this autodestructive way of life is not permanent or universal, but emerged at a specific historical moment. In this sense she departs from her sister Charlotte, who in Jane Eyre gave shape to the far more pacific view that bourgeois society could enable something like happiness or fulfillment. I write:

Written twelve years after this letter [in which Charlotte refers to the 'spoilt' personality of a neighbor from a slave-owning family], Jane Eyre would expunge this spoilt demon [i.e. Bertha Mason] from the record, leaving the stain of the plantation complex behind in a pile of charred rubble so as to clear space for heteronormative futurity between white characters, such that (as Jane reports) “perfect concord is the result” (C. Brontë, Jane Eyre, 519).19 “My Edward and I,” says Jane in conclusion, “are happy: and the more so, because those we most love are happy likewise” (C. Brontë, Jane Eyre, 520).

Emily’s view was darker. In a now-famous school essay she composed in Belgium, “The Butterfly” (1842), she wrote that “the universe appeared . . . a vast machine constructed only to produce evil” (178). As the semi-fictionalized speaker of the essay works through this insight, (s)he comes to see in the butterfly an image of how splendid beauty, “lustrous gold and purple,” can emerge from pure violence: nature “exists,” the narrator says “on a principle of destruction” (E. Brontë, “Butterfly,” 176).20 In Emily’s school essay, this principle is imagined as universal, valid in all times and all places.

Wuthering Heights would transform this grim metaphysics into a violent scenario many readers have mistaken for eternal. The tendency toward ruin in the novel appears to be a dynamic outside time. In fact it is rigorously dated, the book’s principle of destruction arriving along with its “suitable pair” of central exogamous characters (E. Brontë, Wuthering, 1). Heathcliff arrives at Wuthering Heights in 1781, at the height of the Liverpool-based slave economy, and Lockwood arrives in 1801, at the dawn of a new, modern century: twinned advents marked with a slanted chronological specificity I will describe more below. In this way is the auto-demolishing character of accumulation by extraction marked as historically emergent and dynamic across time, the “convergence between progress and decay” structuring the book (Hiday 248) only one modality by which it investigates the intimacy between luster and ruin across the period of an aspirationally universalizing Atlantic capitalism.

The Wuthering Heights chapter is crucial to the book because it helps frame my point (which is really Emily Brontë's point) that we currently inhabit a world whose normal order of operation is based, as Brontë puts it, on a principle of destruction. The fossil fueled imperialism of our present is in some ways a ghostly replay of the nineteenth century: the rapacious capture of the object world and the domination of subordinated peoples we see when we scroll through the news are in some ways hyperspeed versions of the social order Brontë watched gathering around her in the 1840s. So in that sense there is a representative quality to this passage, for sure. But the book also ranges further than this local argument about a gathering fossil capitalism and its afterlives. It's about how to inhabit systems that are dissolving and breaking and inescapable, and still find ways to elaborate new worlds out of those broken inheritances.

That's a long way of saying that in some ways the Page 99 Test works for Action without Hope—I think. In fact one thread of the book is about just this question of parts and wholes: how a tiny detail can evoke a much larger configuration. As I try to say in the book, this synecdochal quality is a literary effect, of course, but it's also how all thinking happens. We develop emblems for larger concepts, images that feel vivid, but point to something beyond themselves. Observing this scalar and figural quality of all thinking leads me to spend a lot of time mulling over the idea of the detail: what is a detail, how can small things matter, and what kinds of perceptual capacities do we need to appreciate both the texture of the small thing, and the dynamic ways it connects to the broader world of which it's only a partial evocation? This is the plot of Middlemarch, as I say in the book, and it's also why Action without Hope works on two levels: it's an argument for the quiet power of small, nearly insignificant activities, and also a manifesto for the kinds of reading that are necessary to appreciate those tiny things. I think people should look at page 151, too: that's my favorite one.

Visit Nathan K. Hensley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Matthews's "Sex and Love in Porfirian Mexico City"

Michael Matthews is professor of history at Elon University. He is the author of The Civilizing Machine: A Cultural History of Mexican Railroads, 1876–1910.

Matthews applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sex and Love in Porfirian Mexico City: A Social History of Working-Class Courtship, and shared the following:

Opening to page 99 takes the reader smack-dab in the middle of one of the many rapto cases that serve as the basis of this book, albeit one of the more salacious and titillating examples. The crime of rapto in turn-of-the-century Mexico, while defined as the abduction of an underage woman from parental authority, also often functioned as elopements planned by young couples in the face of family opposition. This case, which stems from a mysterious set of events that took place in 1907 between one romantically involved couple, although not representative of the entire book, does highlight key themes: societal gender norms and expectations; gendered performativity, especially before legal authorities; concerns about female virginity; and male anxieties about how modernization spurred female sexual freedom. On this page, specifically, we find twenty-seven-year-old police officer Guillermo, defending himself before an investigating judge for the abduction of fourteen-year-old Carmen, a teenage girl who he courted. Guillermo seeks to undermine her social standing before the judge claiming that she was not a virgin when they had sex because she had admitted to him that “one night while dreaming she had introduced her finger and…lost her virginity.” We also find, on this page, that Carmen’s mother seeks to undermine Guillermo social standing and manhood by claiming that he abandoned his pregnant girlfriend to chase after her daughter. The mother, finishing her declaration to the judge, submits a clipping from a popular Mexico City newspaper of a fictional story she claimed Guillermo wrote. Although continuing onto the following page, it tells the tale of a flirtatious coquet also named Carmen—who happens to live on the very street on which the real Carmen lived. In the story, the coquet uses revealing clothes and attractive makeup to lure two young men into a deadly duel over her affection. One dies and the other is sent to prison while Carmen looks on with glee from her tenement building window.

While page 99 highlights key themes, the book, more broadly, seeks to show the vast diversity of different ways that turn-of-the-century Mexico City’s expanding infrastructure, increased factory work, and new leisure and entertainment activities shaped the courtship and sexual practices of the working class.

Learn more about Sex and Love in Porfirian Mexico City at the University Press of Florida website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eugenia Zuroski's "A Funny Thing"

Eugenia Zuroski is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Ontario. She is the author of A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism (2013) and editor of the journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction. She has also published two chapbooks of poetry, Kintail Beach (2022) and Hovering, Seen (2019).

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Funny Thing: Eighteenth-Century Literature Undisciplined, and reported the following:

Page 99 of A Funny Thing lands us on the page in which I discuss Horace Walpole’s Preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto, published in 1765. I would say that this page both does and does not give the reader a good sense of the work as a whole.

It does in the sense that it drops the reader right into a bit of historical literary criticism, in which I analyze how the different prefaces frame the tale for eighteenth-century readers, shifting their expectations of what literature is for. Such is the bread and butter of literary analysis, which is what this book is made of. A reader who is not already interested in literature from this period might conclude that this book would bore them—and maybe they’d be right. A Funny Thing is a work of academic literary criticism, and as such, it dwells deeply with textual detail and cultural context.

But the page does not at all give a sense of the breadth of texts and contexts that the book contains, nor its sense of humor! It doesn’t tell you, for example, that before page 99 you get a long discussion of flying penises in Western art and culture (with pictures!), or that the discussion of Walpole leads to a heartfelt meditation on the forms of intimacy he cultivated through shared creative projects with his friends, or that I connect The Castle of Otranto to Daniel Lavery’s absolutely brilliant series from The Toast, “Erotica Written By an Alien Pretending Not to Be Horrified by the Human Body,” or that the book culminates in an extended reading of Bob the Drag Queen’s “iconic wig reveal” on the show “We’re Here.”

In a way, though, page 99 is perfect, because it contains the epigraph to The Castle of Otranto where Walpole deliberately misquotes Horace from the Ars Poetica in a playful and irreverent effort to make space in British literature for departures from neoclassical standards—to refuse the empirical, the tasteful, the serious, and the proper in favor of the flighty, the silly, the outrageous, the funny. And this exact close reading, of this preface, which I have been teaching for years, was the seed of the entire project. So to me, this page really is the heart of the book, and the book is dear to my heart.

Visit Eugenia Zuroski's website.

--Marshal Zeringue