Category: Modern and Contemporary
-
Gooday, Graeme, Domesticating Electricity
Graeme Gooday, Domesticating Electricity: Technology, Uncertainty and Gender, 1880-1914 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008). 292 pp. £60 hb. ISBN 978 1 85196 580 9. Scholars of the history of technology will be justifiably pleased by this informative survey of the slow but steady progression of electricity from an uncertain and luxurious alternative to generating power…
-
McLean, Steven, H. G. Wells: Interdisciplinary Essays and The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells
Steven McLean (ed.), H.G. Wells: Interdisciplinary Essays (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 184 pp. £19.99pbk. ISBN: 978-1443811262. Steven McLean, The Early Fiction of H.G. Wells: Fantasies of Science (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 242pp. £50hbk. ISBN: 978-0230535626. H.G. Wells: Interdisciplinary Essays (first published in hardback in 2008) is the product of an annual H.G. Wells Society symposium,…
-
Bowler, Peter J., Science for All
Peter J. Bowler, Science for All: The Popularisation of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). xii+339 pp. £31 hb. ISBN 978-0-226-06863-3. In Science for All: The Popularisation of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain Peter Bowler seeks to redress the balance as far as studies of popular science are concerned, investigating…
-
Cordle, Daniel, States of Suspense
Daniel Cordle, States of Suspense: The Nuclear Age, Postmodernism and United States Fiction and Prose (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). ix+172pp. £50.00 hb. ISBN 978 0 7190 7712 8. Daniel Cordle’s brilliant analysis of North American literature during the Cold War focuses not on images of nuclear destruction, but instead on descriptions of nuclear anxiety.…
-
Ruddick, Nicholas, The Fire in the Stone
Nicholas Ruddick, The Fire in the Stone: Prehistoric Fiction from Charles Darwin to Jean M. Auel (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009). xvii+265 pp. £31.50 hb. ISBN 978-0-8195-6900-4. The Fire in the Stone is the first comprehensive study in English of what Nicholas Ruddick calls prehistoric fiction or pf, by analogy with science fiction as…
-
Gordon, Rae Beth, Dances with Darwin, 1875-1910
Rae Beth Gordon, Dances with Darwin, 1875-1910: Vernacular Modernity in France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009). 311 pp. £60 hb. ISBN 0754652434. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) Rae Beth Gordon’s Dances with Darwin examines a unique combination of influences including hystero-epilepsy, Darwinism, and a fascination with Africa which conflated in vivid café-concert performances…
-
Jacyna, L. S., Medicine and Modernism
L. S. Jacyna, Medicine and Modernism: A Biography of Sir Henry Head, Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century series, 6 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008) 368 pp. £60 hb. ISBN 13: 978-1-85-196907-4 Students of the humanities and the sciences (and those who dare to cross the boundaries) are very familiar with the arguments regarding…
-
Sleigh, Charlotte, Six Legs Better
Charlotte Sleigh, Six Legs Better: A Cultural History of Myrmecology (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP, 2007). 302 pp. £36.50 hb. ISBN 0-8018-8445-4. We might be surprised to discover how many of our beliefs about the mind, society, economics and communication are indebted to research on ants, through the field of myrmecology. Charlotte Sleigh’s Six Legs Better:…
-
Armstrong, Philip, What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity
Philip Armstrong, What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2007). 256 pp. £ 60 hb, £18.99 pb. ISBN 978-0415358385 (hb)/978-0415358392 (pb) A book using the terms ‘animal’ and ‘modernity’ in its title almost intrinsically assumes the burden of evolution. In What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity, Philip Armstrong suggests that…
-
Burney, Ian, Poison, Detection and the Victorian Imagination
—
by
Laurie Garrison
Ian Burney, Poison, Detection and the Victorian Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). 224pp. £35 hb. ISBN 0719073766. The middle decades of the nineteenth century are well-known to be a period where popular culture was fascinated with deviant behaviours. These were the decades that saw the height of popularity of sensation novels and sensation drama, genres rife with…
