Category: Modern and Contemporary
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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:…
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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…
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Burney, Ian, Poison, Detection and the Victorian Imagination
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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…
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Stiles, Anne (ed), Neurology and Literature, 1860-1920
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by
Deric Corlew
Anne Stiles (ed.), Neurology and Literature, 1860-1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 240 pp. £48 hb. ISBN 978-0230520943. In the late nineteenth century, the term “neurology” referred not only to the medical study of the nervous system, but also encompassed a broad range of fields from neuroscience to clinical psychology. This collection of eight essays is thus…
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Crawford, Robert (ed), Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science
Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science, edited by Robert Crawford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 234 + xvi pp. £19.99 hb. ISBN 978-0-19-925812-3. This is primarily a book about contemporary poetry, and what poetry can do now, as seen through its engagement with aspects of contemporary science. It is only fleetingly a book about ‘science and poetry’, where the…
