Category: Reviews
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Ward, David, Coleridge and the Nature of Imagination: Evolution, Engagement with the World, and Poetry
David Ward, Coleridge and the Nature of Imagination: Evolution, Engagement with the World, and Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) David Ward’s approach to reading Coleridge through the ‘sciences of the brain’ (vii) yields a valuable contribution to scholarship on the Imagination in Coleridge’s poetry, with close readings of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, ‘Kubla Khan’…
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Bruni, John, Scientific Americans: The Making of Popular Science and Evolution in Early-Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture
John Bruni, Scientific Americans: The Making of Popular Science and Evolution in Early-Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014). Herbert Spencer’s doctrine of ‘survival of the fittest’ was an undeniable influence on non-specialist conceptions of evolution around the turn of the twentieth century, particularly in America. Social Darwinism, though inaccurately…
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Marsden, Ben and Hazel Hutchison and Ralph O’Connor (eds), Uncommon Contexts: Encounters Between Science and Literature, 1800-1914
Marsden, Ben, Hazel Hutchison and Ralph O’Connor, eds. Uncommon Contexts: Encounters Between Science and Literature, 1800-1914. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013. 256pp £60 HB ISBN 978-1-84893-362-0 In his introduction, Ben Marsden frames Uncommon Contexts as a rejection of C.P. Snow’s dichotomy between the ‘two cultures’ of literature and science. Marsden’s objective in this collection is to cut across…
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Miert, Dirk van (ed), Communicating Observations in Early Modern Letters (1500-1675): Epistolography and Epistemology in the Age of the Scientific Revolution
Dirk van Miert (ed.), Communicating Observations in Early Modern Letters (1500-1675): Epistolography and Epistemology in the Age of the Scientific Revolution, Warburg Institute Colloquia 23 (London and Turin: The Warburg Institute and Nino Aragno Editore, 2013), 289 pp. £50 pb. ISBN 9781908590466. This volume—based on a colloquium held at the Warburg Institute, London, in…
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Engels, Eve-Marie and Thomas F. Glick (eds), The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe
Eve-Marie Engels and Thomas F. Glick (eds), The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe , vols 1 and 2 (London: Continuum, 2008), lxxii + 659 pp, £225 hb, ISBN 9780826458339; Thomas F. Glick and Elinor Shaffer (eds), The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe , vols 3 and 4 (London: Bloomsbury Academic,…
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Hagen, Margareth and Margery Vibe Skagen (eds), Literature and Chemistry: Elective Affinities
Margareth Hagen and Margery Vibe Skagen (eds.) Literature and Chemistry: Elective Affinities (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2014), 340pp. ISBN 978-87-7124-174-7. The Interdisciplinary study of literature and science has continued to progress in the last few decades. Academics are beginning to leave behind the concept of C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” and are focusing on the commonalities…
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Malcolmson, Cristina, Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society
Cristina Malcolmson, Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society: Boyle, Cavendish, Swift (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), xii + 233pp. £54.00. ISBN: 978-0-7546-3778-3. BSLS members are entitled to a 20% discount on Ashgate titles. Click here for details. This absorbing monograph seeks to re-locate the origins of scientific racism to the late seventeenth century, showing…
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Salisbury, Laura and Andrew Shail (eds), Neurology and Modernity
Laura Salisbury and Andrew Shail (eds.), Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800-1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 298 pp. £60 Hb. ISBN 978-0-230-23313-3. Neurology and Modernity announces itself as a book which argues that ‘to speak of neurology and modernity is to describe a relationship of mutual constitution’ (1), describing the two…
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Dawson, Gowan and Bernard Lightman (eds), Victorian Science and Literature (8 vols)
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by
John Holmes
Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman (eds), Victorian Science and Literature, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011-12). 3408 pp. £700 hb (£350 per 4 volume set). ISBN 978-1848930919 and 978-1848930926. In their general introduction to their huge and handsome new anthology of Victorian writings about science, Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman spell out very clearly…
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Trower, Shelley, Senses of Vibration
Shelley Trower, Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound (London: Continuum, 2012). 214pp. £14.99 Pb. ISBN 9781441148636. Good vibrations, as the Beach Boys knew, promise more than just musical pleasure. Indeed, a history of modernity can be written from the perspective of vibration, as Shelley Trower demonstrates in this fascinating…
