Category: Reviews
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Kandel, Eric R, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures
Eric R Kandel, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures (New York: Columbia University Press 2016) 226 pp. $29.95 Hb. ISBN 978-0-231-179962-1. Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, as the name suggests, is a comprehensive synthesis of two schools of thought previously considered at best tenuously linked, at worst mutually exclusive. Kandel…
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Kornbluh, Anna, Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form
Anna Kornbluh, Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (New York: Fordham University Press 2014) 232 pp. $50.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780823254972 As the world slowly recovered from the devastating financial crisis of 2008, accounts of the catastrophe reflexively blamed investors for recklessly abusing byzantine financial instruments culminating in global hysteria. While everyday market…
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Cordle, Daniel, Late Cold War Literature and Culture: The Nuclear 1980s
Daniel Cordle, Late Cold War Literature and Culture: The Nuclear 1980s (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2017) 229pp., £52.99 EPUB, PDF, £66.99 Hb. ISBN: 9781137513076 Daniel Cordle’s Late Cold War Literature and Culture: The Nuclear 1980s works to examine the underlying social, political, economic and cultural anxieties during the Cold War era. Cordle moves through the decade’s…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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’…
