Category: Reviews
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Ifill, Helena, Creating Character: Theories of Nature and Nurture in Victorian Sensation Fiction
Helena Ifill, Creating Character: Theories of Nature and Nurture in Victorian Sensation Fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2018) viii + 232 pp. £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-7849-9513-3 The ‘Queen of the Circulating Library’, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and her ‘literary father’ (in Braddon’s own estimate), Wilkie Collins, conquered the 1860s reading public in Britain and beyond with…
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Karpenko, Lara and Shalyn Claggett (eds), Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age
Lara Karpenko and Shalyn Claggett (eds), Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,2017) 312 pp. 8 B&W Illustrations. $60.00 Hb. ISBN:9780472130177 Strange Science is a thoughtfully compiled collection of essays exploring various intersections of Victorian fringe science and mainstream culture. The essays are grouped into three sections,…
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Mulvey-Roberts, Marie, Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal
Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2016) 272 pp. £72 Hb. ISBN: 9780719085413 The gothic imaginary foregrounds the body unlike any other imaginary. In her methodically researched and richly detailed work, Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal, Marie Mulvey-Roberts confirms this truth. Corporal parts, the bloodied bits, scraps and…
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Tankard, Alex, Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Invalid Lives
Alex Tankard, Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Invalid Lives (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2018) ix + 238 pp. £62.99 PDF & EPUB, £79.00 Hb. ISBN 978-3-319-71445-5 Alex Tankard’s Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Invalid Lives is a title in Palgrave Macmillan’s Literary Disability Studies, a series dedicated to literary readings informed by…
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Fairclough, Mary, Literature, Electricity and Politics 1740-1840: ‘Electrick Communication Every Where’
Mary Fairclough, Literature, Electricity and Politics 1740-1840: ‘Electrick Communication Every Where’ (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2017) 264 + ix pp. £63.99 PDF & EPUB, £79.99 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-137-59314-6 Throughout history, perhaps few phenomena have seemed as strange or as spectacular as electricity –observable and demonstrated long before it was understood. Mary Fairclough’s Literature, Electricity and Politics…
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Tondre, Michael, The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender
Michael Tondre, The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press 2018) 242 pp. $45.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780813941455 Michael Tondre considers the ways in which mathematical physics influenced Victorian literature, science, and statistics from 1850 to 1880. His book is divided into two parts, with four chapters that survey a…
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Foltz, Jonathan, The Novel after Film: Modernism and the Decline of Autonomy
Jonathan Foltz, The Novel after Film: Modernism and the Decline of Autonomy (New York: Oxford University Press 2018) 289 pp. £46.49 Hb. ISBN: 9780190676490 This book offers a fresh approach to the simultaneous and interlinked analysis of literature and film by reassessing the contributions of such major authors as Virginia Woolf, H. D., Aldous Huxley…
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Gaedtke, Andrew, Modernism and the Machinery of Madness: Psychosis, Technology, and Narrative Worlds
Andrew Gaedtke, Modernism and the Machinery of Madness: Psychosis, Technology, and Narrative Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 254 pp. $80.00 PDF, £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781108418003 In the Introduction to his captivating monograph, Modernism and the Machinery of Madness, Andrew Gaedtke states that one of the book’s goals is ‘to trace the form and logic…
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Smith, Matthew Wilson, The Nervous Stage: Nineteenth-century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre
Matthew Wilson Smith, The Nervous Stage: Nineteenth-century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre Oxford University Press 2017 240 pp. £29.99 Hb. ISBN: 9780190644086 In The Nervous Stage Matthew Wilson Smith unfolds a fascinating world of relationships between nineteenth-century studies on the nerves and drama, in order to demonstrate that the roots of brain research…
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Meyer, Steven (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science
Steven Meyer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 350 pp. $26.00 Pdf. £74.99 Hb. £24.99 Pb. ISBN: 9781107079724 It is perhaps the fact that 2018 is the anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that this eclectic collection reminded me of Victor Frankenstein’s response on first seeing…
