Category: Reviews
-
Cleminson, Richard, Catholicism, Race and Empire: Eugenics in Portugal, 1900-1950
Richard Cleminson, Catholicism, Race and Empire: Eugenics in Portugal, 1900-1950 (Budapest: Central European University Press 2014) 350 pp. $60 Hb. (CEU Press Studies in the History of Medicine, vol 5) ISSN: 2079-1119 A vast amount of research has been done on the twentieth-century eugenic movements that experienced a significant degree of institutionalisation in Germany, the…
-
Grøtta, Marit, Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and Nineteenth-Century Media
Marit Grøtta, Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and Nineteenth-Century Media (London: Bloomsbury 2015) 216 pp. £27.09 EPUB, PDF, £31.09 Pb, £88.09 Hb. ISBN: 9781628924404 Much has been made, over the years, of the nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire’s criticism of photography, especially in his review of the Salon of 1859. On the…
-
Elbert, Monika and Bridget M. Marshall (eds), Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century
Monika Elbert and Bridget M. Marshall (eds), Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century (Farnham: Ashgate 2013) 282 pp. £37.99 Pb, £110.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781409447702 Through its engaging and multiple approaches, Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century offers original insights on the development of the Gothic…
-
Skuse, Alanna, Constructions of Cancer in Early Modern England: Ravenous Natures
Alanna Skuse, Constructions of Cancer in Early Modern England: Ravenous Natures (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2015) viii + 219 pp. £15.00 Pb, £20.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-137-48752-0 Open access https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2F9781137487537.pdf Alanna Skuse’s Constructions of Cancer is a cultural history of a disease that we tend to think as modern, but which has a long and rich past. Skuse…
-
Kistler, Jordan, Arthur O’Shaughnessy, A Pre-Raphaelite Poet in the British Museum
Jordan Kistler, Arthur O’Shaughnessy, A Pre-Raphaelite Poet in the British Museum (Oxford: Routledge 2016) 199pp. £110.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781472467355 I approached this book (as I suspect many readers will) with a keen interest in interactions between Victorian science and literature, but little knowledge of Arthur O’Shaughnessy (1844-81). As such, I was at first intrigued by…
-
Moore, Wendy, The Mesmerist: The Society Doctor Who Held Victorian London Spellbound
Wendy Moore, The Mesmerist: The Society Doctor Who Held Victorian London Spellbound (London: Orion Publishing 2017) 320 pp. £18.99 Hb ISBN:9781474602297 Prior to 1780 Europeans largely believed that what we now call mental illness was a result of demonic possession, with a demon inhabiting the body of the afflicted and mechanically operating them like a…
-
Wellmann, Janina, The Form of Becoming: Embryology and the Epistemology of Rhythm, 1760-1830
Janina Wellmann, The Form of Becoming: Embryology and the Epistemology of Rhythm, 1760-1830, translated by Kate Sturge (New York: Zone Books 2017) 432 pp. $34.95 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-935408-76-5 In her recent book Forms Caroline Levine calls for a broad definition of form as ‘all shapes and configurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and difference’…
-
Clarke, Bruce and Manuela Rossini (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman
Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2017) xxxiv + 231 pp. $22.00 PDF, £17.99 Pb, £49.99 Hb. ISBN: 9781107086203 As The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman demonstrates, posthuman ideas have been around for centuries, even if the exact word and concept…
-
Boehm, Katharina, Charles Dickens and the Sciences of Childhood: Popular Medicine, Child Health and Victorian Culture
Katharina Boehm, Charles Dickens and the Sciences of Childhood: Popular Medicine, Child Health and Victorian Culture (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan 2013) x, 236 pp. £45.99 PDF, EPUB, £55 Pb, £58 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-137-36249-0 In her introduction, Katharina Boehm cites Thomas Kuhn and Bruno Latour as pioneers in the study of ‘knowledge-producing practices, undertaken by many different social…
-
Crawford, Paul and Brian Brown and Charley Baker and Victoria Tischler and Brian Abrams, Health Humanities
Paul Crawford, Brian Brown, Charley Baker, Victoria Tischler and Brian Abrams, Health Humanities (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmilan 2015) 194pp. £15.99 EPUB & PDF, £19.99 Pb, £58.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781137282606 How can studies in the arts and humanities influence, shape and inform our cultural understanding of health and healthcare-related activities? This is the main question animating Health…
