Category: Reviews
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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…
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MacDuffie, Allen, Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination
Allen MacDuffie, Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). ix + 305 pp. Hb £60.00, PDF $76.00 ISBN: 9781107064379 The problems relating to energy production and ecological sustainability which we face as a global community are, according to Allen MacDuffie, both material and representational. Nature itself imposes material limits on our capacity…
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Crane, Mary Thomas, Losing touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England
Mary Thomas Crane, Losing touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2014) 248 pp. Hb, EPUB, Mobi, PDF $49.95. ISBN: 978-1-4214-1531-4 Losing touch with Nature focuses on the reception of new scientific views in sixteenth-century England, a changing period during which the Aristotelian, Galenic, and Ptolemaic systems…
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Style, Daniel Brown. The Poetry of Victorian Scientists:, Science and Nonsense
Daniel Brown, The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense (Cambridge University Press 2013) xii + 310 pp. Hb £59.99, Pb £18.99, PDF $24.00. ISBN 9781107023376 Daniel Brown’s The Poetry of Victorian Scientists begins with a counterintuitive premise: how does nonsense serve as a foundation for knowledge, allowing for the development of increasingly professional and…
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Ferngren, Gary B., Medicine and Religion: a Historical Introduction
Gary B. Ferngren, Medicine and Religion: a Historical Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) 256 pp. Hb $49.95, Pb, EPub, Mobi, PDF $24.95. ISBN: 9781421412153 Gary Ferngren’s Medicine and Religion is a survey of the intersections between medical practices, broadly defined, and religious traditions across different societies and historical periods in the Western world.…
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Parrinder, Patrick, Utopian Literature and Science: From the Scientific Revolution to Brave New World and Beyond
Patrick Parrinder, Utopian Literature and Science: From the Scientific Revolution to Brave New World and Beyond (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) ix, 222 pp. Hb £55.00. ISBN: 978-1-137-45677-9 Several questions provide the framework for Patrick Parrinder’s Utopian Literature and Science, the most compelling of which, perhaps, is whether or not there is a profound and irresolvable…
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Armstrong, Paul B., How Literature Plays with the Brain
Paul B. Armstrong, How Literature Plays with the Brain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) xv+221 pp. Hb $49.95, Pb, EPub, Mobi, PDF $29.95. ISBN: 978-1-4214-1576-5 Although this study covers ground familiar to anyone conversant with scientific and/or humanist perspectives on such notions as empathy, de-familiarization or hermeneutics, Armstrong’s analysis – as suggested by the…
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Narain, Mona and Karen Gevirtz (eds), Gender and Space in British Literature, 1660-1820
Mona Narain and Karen Gevirtz,(eds.), Gender and Space in British Literature, 1660-1820 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). 239 pp. £95.95 Hb, PDF, ePUB. ISBN: 978-1-4724-1508-0 This book covers the period of British history and literature between 1660 and 1820 when borders and boundaries including gendered geographies of power began to be reconfigured due to structural transformations in…
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Duffy, Larry, Flaubert, Zola, and the Incorporation of Disciplinary Knowledge
Larry Duffy, Flaubert, Zola, and the Incorporation of Disciplinary Knowledge (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), xvii + 261 pp. £58 Hb, £45.99 PDF. ISBN 978-1-137-29753-2 In his latest study, Larry Duffy meticulously traces the weave of knowledge as it appears in the fabric of the nineteenth century novel. In the texts of those two great icons…
