Category: Reviews
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Yale, Elizabeth, Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain
Elizabeth Yale, Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2016) 384pp. Hb, PDF $69.95. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4781-7 Tracing the networks of correspondence, authorship, and print in early modern natural history, Elizabeth Yale describes the field’s project of delineating Britain topographically and thus as a political object. Sociable Knowledge…
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Phegley, Jennifer et. al. (eds), Transatlantic Sensations
Jennifer Phegley, John Cyril Barton and Kristin N. Huston, eds, pref by David S Reynolds, Transatlantic Sensations (Oxford: Routledge 2012) 302 pp. Hb, £95.00. ISBN: 9781409427155 This book sets out to examine narrative and artistic representations of sensation. Choosing and using diverse approaches to the subject matter, this collection of essays demonstrates the strongly interdependent relationship between…
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Solomonescu, Yasmin, John Thelwall and the Materialist Imagination
Yasmin Solomonescu, John Thelwall and the Materialist Imagination (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2014) xii, 226 pp. Hb, £58.00. ISBN: 978-1-137-42613-0 In July 2014, the John Thelwall Society and the University of Notre Dame in London celebrated Thelwall, the poet, elocutionist, and political agitator, at 250. The event was triumphant in spirit, and the organisers and attendees relished…
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Keen, Suzanne, Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination
Suzanne Keen, Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination (Columbus: Ohio State University Press 2014) xiii + 236 pp. Hb $64.95 , Pb $25.95 , CD $14.95. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1249-3 Suzanne Keen begins her book by discussing the sexologist Havelock Ellis’s review of ‘Hardy’s Novels’ from 1883.1 She highlights his observation that when anonymously published some nine…
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Frevert, Ute et al., Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700-2000
Ute Frevert, Christian Bailey, Pascal Eitler, Benno Gammerl, Bettina Hitzer, Margrit Pernau, Monique Scheer, Anne Schmidt, and Nina Verheyen, Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) x + 287 pp. Hb £68.00. ISBN: 9780199655731 In the opening chapter of this ambitious collaborative book, Ute Frevert acknowledges…
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Eggert, Katherine, Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England
Katherine Eggert, Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) 368 pp. Hb, EPUB, PDF $55.00. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4751-0 Katherine Eggert’s examination of early modern alchemy and epistemic practices begins with a seemingly irrational proposition; namely, it is “possible not to know what one knows” (2). As…
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Pietsch, B. M., Dispensational Modernism
B. M. Pietsch, Dispensational Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015) 262 pp. Hb £47.99. ISBN: 978-0-19-024408-8 This book explores the origins of dispensationalism within early American fundamentalism, calling attention to scientific rhetoric and engineering methods utilised by dispensationalists for interpreting the Bible and understanding the nature of time. The author offers a thought-provoking re-evaluation…
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Raines, Melissa Anne, George Eliot’s Grammar of Being
Melissa Anne Raines, George Eliot’s Grammar of Being (London: Anthem Press, 2011), xxiv + 208 pp. Hb £60.00, Pb £25.00. ISBN: 9781783080748 Melissa Anne Raines’s George Eliot’s Grammar of Being emulates, if not exceeds, Eliot’s famously careful attention to phrasing and grammar. Raines takes her cue from a line in Eliot’s introduction to Felix…
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Kontou, Tatiana and Sarah Willburn (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult
Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Willburn (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult (Ashgate: Farnham, 2012) 454 pp. Hb £95.00. ISBN: 9780754669128 The Victorian fascination with spiritualism and the occult still sits rather awkwardly within our understanding of an age that consciously defined itself through narratives of scientific, technological and intellectual modernisation.…
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Walter, Christina, Optical Impersonality: Science, Images and Literary Modernism
Christina Walter, Optical Impersonality: Science, Images and Literary Modernism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) 352pp. Hb, EPUB, MOBI , PDF $59.95. ISBN: 9781421413648 Walter’s book sets out to reframe modernist impersonality across three sites of cultural investigation: the history of optical science, the history of image-text relations, and the history of personality. Whilst the…
