Category: Reviews
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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…
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Tate, Gregory, The Poet’s Mind
Gregory Tate, The Poet’s Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry, 1830-1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 224pp. £60 Hb. ISBN 978-0-19-965941-8. In The Poet’s Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry, Gregory Tate works, in the true spirit of BSLS, to repair what so much of the twentieth century has torn asunder – the close and complex relations between…
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Feerick, Jean and Vin Nardizzi (eds), The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature
Jean Feerick and Vin Nardizzi (eds), The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 304pp. £52.00 Hb. ISBN 9780230340473 What is an indistinct human—or indistinct about the human? When did such odd questions become askable? The mere title of this collection of thirteen compact essays introduced by two careful editors provokes such inquiries, and…
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Mittman, Asa Simon and Peter Dendle (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous
Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). 598pp. £90 Hb. ISBN 978-1-4094-0754-6 BSLS members receive a 20% discount on Ashgate titles. Click here for details. From the serpent-legged Typhoeus in Hesiod’s Theogeny to the über-stylish parade of sparkly teen vampires that bite and brood…
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Schaffner, Anna Katharina, Modernism and Perversion
Anna Katharina Schaffner, Modernism and Perversion: Sexual Deviance in Sexology and Literature, 1850-1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 315pp. £18.99 Pb. ISBN 9780230231634. Modernism and Perversion explores what happened after ‘[t]he pervert ceased to be a sinner and instead became a patient’ (5). This shift was connected to ‘the emergence of sexology’ (5). Drawing on the work…
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Ben-Zaken, Avner, Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean,1560-1660
Avner Ben-Zaken, Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560-1660 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). xii+246pp. £31 Hb. ISBN 9780801894763 In The White Castle Orhan Pamuk uses the capture of a Christian ship by a Turkish galley to ruminate on that seemingly perennial theme, east-west relations. A novelistic sleight of hand symbolically dissolves identity and…
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Buckland, Adelene, Novel Science
Adelene Buckland, Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 400pp. £31.50 Hb. ISBN 9780226079684. Geology took on huge popularity in nineteenth-century Britain. Men and women of many backgrounds – miners and middle-class ladies as well as more gentlemanly scientific types – ventured out with hammers to find geological…
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Aït-Touati, Frédérique, Fictions of the Cosmos
Frédérique Aït-Touati, Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century, trans. Susan Emanuel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 261 pp. HB £31.50. ISBN 978-0-226-01122-4. Fictions of the Cosmos explores the intricate relationship between scientific and literary discourses in seventeenth-century Europe. The interpenetration of early modern scientific and literary language and genres…
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Hanson, Clare, Eugenics, Literature and Culture in Post-war Britain
Clare Hanson, Eugenics, Literature and Culture in Post-War Britain (New York: Routledge, 2013). 190pp. HB £85.00. ISBN 9780415806985. Eugenics is frequently invoked in discussions of contemporary biomedicine and biotechnologies. Whether arguing that post-genomic biology provides opportunities for eugenics to re-emerge (as Troy Duster does), or that contemporary biopolitics is utterly dissimilar to the biopolitical strategies…
