Category: Reviews
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Bashford, Alison and Joyce E. Chaplin, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the Principle of Population
Alison Bashford and Joyce E. Chaplin, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the Principle of Population (London: Princeton University Press, 2016) 368 pp. £35.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780823272990 The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus offers a timely reappraisal of Malthus’s writing on population within the context of eighteenth and early nineteenth century colonial…
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Morgan, Benjamin, The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science
Benjamin Morgan, The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017) 368 pp. £26.00 Pb. ISBN: 9780226462202 Benjamin Morgan’s The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature undertakes a compelling and persuasive analysis of the somewhat obscure but nonetheless engaging relationship between aesthetics and science in the Victorian period.…
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Lamb, Jonathan, Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery
Jonathan Lamb, Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016) 328 pp. £35.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780691182933 Scurvy impacted profoundly the history of Europe’s expansion by sea and, consequently, influenced heavily its society, culture and artistic production. The scientific and medical history of scurvy was discussed by Kenneth J. Carpenter in The History of…
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Trollinger, Susan L. and William Vance Trollinger, Jr., Righting America at the Creation Museum
Susan L. Trollinger and William Vance Trollinger, Jr., Righting America at the Creation Museum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016) 344 pp. £20 Hb. ISBN: 9781421419510 In Righting America at the Creation Museum, Susan L. Trollinger and William Vance Trollinger, Jr. give crucial insights into an American cultural as well as political phenomenon, namely Conservative Christian…
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Halpern, Richard, Eclipse of Action: Tragedy and Political Economy
Richard Halpern, Eclipse of Action: Tragedy and Political Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017) 313 pp. £34.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780226433653 Halpern begins Eclipse of Action with an argument that modern tragedy reflects a crisis in the political economy, a ‘crisis of action’ rather than a ‘crisis in action’, one that threatens the definition of…
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Furniss, Tom, Discovering the Footsteps of Time: Geological Travel Writing about Scotland, 1700-1820
Tom Furniss, Discovering the Footsteps of Time: Geological Travel Writing about Scotland, 1700-1820 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2018) xiv + 305 pp. £80 Hb. ISBN: 9781474410014 Early on in his rigorous monograph, Furniss quotes from Martin Martin’s A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland (1703). The savant from Skye, known also as Màrtainn Màrtainn…
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Botting, Fred and Catherine Spooner (eds), Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects: Imaging Gothic from the Nineteenth Century to the Present
Fred Botting and Catherine Spooner (eds), Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects: Imaging Gothic from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2017) 192 pp. £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-7190-8977-0 Fred Botting and Catherine Spooner’s edited collection Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects: Imaging Gothic from the Nineteenth Century to the Present is the latest installment of Manchester University…
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Jones, Colin, The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris
Colin Jones, The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2014) 256 pp. £14.99 Pb, £22.99 Hb. ISBN: 9780198715818 In a particularly memorable anecdote in his The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris, Colin Jones follows in the footsteps of scholars who have treated Louis XIV’s absolutism as an early form of ‘star…
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Hall, Jason D., Nineteenth-Century Verse and Technology: Machines of Meter
Jason D. Hall, Nineteenth-Century Verse and Technology: Machines of Meter (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2017) 288 pp. £80.00 Hb. ISBN: 9783319535012 This book considers the ‘ways in which machine culture impacted on fundamental conceptions of what poetic meter was and how it worked’ (2). Jason Hall moves from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century but…
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Pak, Chris, Terraforming: Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction
Chris Pak, Terraforming: Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2016) 256 pp. £80 Hb. ISBN: 9781781382844 Terraforming, or Earth-shaping, is a hypothetical process is by which a plant, moon, or other body undergoes substantive changes in atmosphere, temperature, topography, and ecology, to render it fit for human habitation. Martyn Fogg has…
