Category: Reviews
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Reeves, Eileen, Galileo’s Glassworks: the Telescope and the Mirror
Eileen Reeves, Galileo’s Glassworks: The Telescope and the Mirror (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2008). 240 pp. $23.00 Hb. ISBN 978-0-6740-2667-4 In Galileo’s Glassworks, Eileen Reeves deftly reassesses the lapse between the invention of the telescope in Middleburg, September 1608 and the publication of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger) in Venice, March 1610. Mapping out the…
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Brothers, Dometa Wiegand, The Romantic Imagination and Astronomy: On All Sides Infinity
Dometa Wiegand Brothers, The Romantic Imagination and Astronomy: On All Sides Infinity (Palgrave 2015), Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, 216pp. £55 hb. ISBN 978–1–137–47433–9. Jane Taylor’s 1806 poem “The Star,” better known today as the children’s verse “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” highlights the two central and interlocking themes of Dometa…
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Björkén-Nyberg, Cecilia, The Player Piano and the Edwardian Novel
Cecilia Björkén-Nyberg, The Player Piano and the Edwardian Novel (Ashgate, 2015) 222 pp. £60 hb, ebook PDF, ebook ePUB. ISBN: 978-1-4724-3998-7 In a book that showcases the player piano and the Edwardian novel—or ‘the democratisation of music through technology and the storage of musical experience in literature’, as the author, Cecilia Björkén-Nyberg, explains—we are fascinated to…
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Capuano, Peter J., Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body
Peter J. Capuano, Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body (The University of Michigan Press, 2015). 340pp. ISBN 9780472121403 Descriptions of hands flood Victorian novels, and yet, until now, they have received minimal critical attention when compared to other organs (e.g., faces, brains, eyes, skulls, etc.). Their pervasiveness, according to Pete…
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Mousoutzanis, Aris, Fin-de-Siècle Fictions, 1890s/1990s: Apocalypse, Technoscience, Empire
Aris Mousoutzanis, Fin-de-Siѐcle Fictions, 1890s/1990s: Apocalypse, Technoscience, Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) 258pp. £55.00 Hb.ISBN: 978-1-137-26365-0 In Fin-de-Siѐcle Fictions, 1890s/1990s: Apocalypse, Technoscience, Empire, Aris Mousoutzanis introduces a succinct and passionate examination of the ‘shifts in the relations between power and knowledge’ that register ‘in the popular cultural production’ of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries…
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Bourcier, Simon de, Pynchon and Relativity: Narrative Time in Thomas Pynchon’s Later Novels
Simon de Bourcier, Pynchon and Relativity: Narrative Time in Thomas Pynchon’s Later Novels. Continuum Literary Studies, (Bloomsbury: London 2013). 240pp. Hb £45.50, Pb £13.99. ISBN: 978-1441130099 Simon de Bourcier’s study sets out to provide a substantial and exhaustive scientific reading of Thomas Pynchon’s late-career novels, in particular Against the Day and Mason & Dixon. Within the active…
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Priestman, Martin, The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin: Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times
Martin Priestman, The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin: Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times(Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). xiv + 310 pp. £70 Hb. ISBN 978-1-4724-1954-5. Erasmus Darwin was a successful doctor, inventor, scientist and poet, a vast man with an even vaster range of interests and capabilities once described by Coleridge as ‘the first literary character in Europe’ (quoted…
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Ebury, Katherine, Modernism and Cosmology: Absurd Lights,
Katherine Ebury, Modernism & Cosmology: Absurd Lights, (Palgrave 2014). 224pp. Hb £55.00. EPUB. PDF. ISBN 9781137393746 In her 2014 monograph Modernism and Cosmology, Katherine Ebury presents three case studies from Irish modernism to analyse the influence of cosmology on modernist writing. The engagingly written work offers a close reading that focuses on references to the new physics in…
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Lightman, Bernard and Bennett Zon (eds), Evolution and Victorian Culture
Bernard Lightman and Bennett Zon (eds.), Evolution and Victorian Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2014), xviii + 320pp. £60 hb. ISBN 9781107028425 At first glance, it seems reasonable to wonder whether the academic world needs another books about Evolution and Victorian Culture. Monumental 1980s studies of Darwin’s influence on his society (most famously those by Gillian…
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Knight, Leah, Reading Green in Early Modern England
Leah Knight, Reading Green in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). 166pp. £60 hb, ebook PDF, ebook ePUB. ISBN: 978-1-4724-0621-7. Leah Knight’s Reading Green in Early Modern England explores the varied meanings and practices associated with “green” in sixteenth and seventeenth century English texts. As Knight is careful to note, green or “going green” did not carry the same…
