Author: Verity Burke

Gowan Dawson, Show Me the Bone: Reconstructing Prehistoric Monsters in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2016) 480pp. $50.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780226332734 ‘“Give me the bone, and I will describe the animal”’ (1), Cuvier is supposed to have declared. Dawson’s monograph examines the rise and fall of Cuvier’s law of correlation, which…

James Secord, Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 320 pp. £18.99 Hb. ISBN: 9780199675265. James Secord’s Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age (Oxford University Press, 2014) takes as its focus seven key texts, including Humphrey Davy’s…

Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009). 224pp. £75 hb. ISBN 0708322239. Teresa Goddu’s assertion that ‘Gothic registers its culture’s anxieties’ frames an important literary theme in the nineteenth century. With medical theories such as physiology that reduced ‘man to “matter”’ (p. 5), scientific revelations such as Darwin’s…