Category: Reviews
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Tattersdill, Will, Science, Fiction and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press
Will Tattersdill, Science, Fiction and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2016) 220 + x pp. $80.00 PDF, £64.99 Hb. ISBN: 9781107144651 Will Tattersdill’s engaging study of the periodical and its role in the creation of science fiction as a genre aims much wider in scope than a survey of the general periodical…
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Green, Anne, Changing France: Literature and Material Culture in the Second Empire
Anne Green, Changing France: Literature and Material Culture in the Second Empire (London: Anthem Press 2011) 208 pp. £70 Hb, £25 Pb. ISBN: 9780857287779 The French Second Empire (1852-1870) always had a problem with its public image. Now associated with froth, superficiality and excess, its beginnings were dark and disturbing. Louis-Napoleon, the nephew of the…
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Davies, Jeremy, Bodily Pain in Romantic Literature
Jeremy Davies, Bodily Pain in Romantic Literature (Oxford: Routledge 2014) 228 pp. £95.00 Hb, £28.00 Pb. ISBN: 9780415842914 The subject of bodily pain is an important and fruitful area of romantic scholarship that Davies gives his full attention in this ambitious and rigorous study. Critics such as Richard Sha, Steven Bruhm and Joanna Bourke have…
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Briefel, Aviva, The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination
Aviva Briefel, The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015) 236 pp. £ 67.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781107116580 The second book published in Victorian Hand studies, Aviva Briefel’s The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination picks up where Peter Capuano’s recent monograph leaves off,1 contributing a needed perspective on intersections between race…
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Willis, Martin (ed), Staging Science: Scientific Performance on Street, Stage and Screen
Martin Willis (ed.) Staging Science: Scientific Performance on Street, Stage and Screen (London: Palgrave 2016) xi+140 pp. £29.99 EPUB & PDF, £37.99 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-137-49993-6 The relationship between science and performance is an issue which scholars across many disciplines have found compelling. In the field of geography, Charles Withers and David Livingstone have examined the…
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Dawson, Gowan, Show Me the Bone: Reconstructing Prehistoric Monsters in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America
Gowan Dawson, Show Me the Bone: Reconstructing Prehistoric Monsters in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2016) 480pp. $50.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780226332734 ‘“Give me the bone, and I will describe the animal”’ (1), Cuvier is supposed to have declared. Dawson’s monograph examines the rise and fall of Cuvier’s law of correlation, which…
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Dickinson, Tommy, ‘Curing Queers’: Mental Nurses and their Patients, 1935-74
Tommy Dickinson, ‘Curing Queers’: Mental Nurses and their Patients, 1935-74 (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2015) 304pp. £70.00 Hb, £14.99 Pb. ISBN: 978-0-7190-9588-7 ‘Curing Queers’: Mental Nurses and their patients, 1935-74 is a much needed account of the role of ‘aversion therapy’ utilized as an alternative to imprisonment as punishment for homosexuality during an era when…
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Henchman, Anna, The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature
Anna Henchman, The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2014) xviii+294 pp. £60 Hb. ISBN 978-0-19-968696-4 Tennyson and Hardy may have gazed at the heavens with a rare intensity, but astronomy provided an important imaginative resource for many poets, novelists and other writers during…
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Adam, Alison, A History of Forensic Science
Alison Adam, A History of Forensic Science (Oxford: Routledge 2016) 236 pp. £90 Hb. ISBN: 9780415856423 The history of forensics is certainly not a large field, but thus far 2016 has witnessed a bumper crop of forensic-centric history books. Alison Adam’s A History of Forensic Science joins David Arnold’s Toxic Histories: Poison and Pollution in…
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DeWitt, Anne, Moral Authority, Men of Science and the Victorian Novel
Anne DeWitt, Moral Authority, Men of Science and the Victorian Novel (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press 2013) 290 pp. £62.00 Hb., £19.99 Pb., $24.00 PDF. ISBN: 9781107036178 The introduction to Anne DeWitt’s Moral Authority, Men of Science and the Victorian Novel proclaims that it will focus on ‘characters who practice or study science, fictional conversations about…
