Category: Reviews

  • Tate, Gregory, The Poet’s Mind

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    Barri Gold

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    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…

  • Feerick, Jean and Vin Nardizzi (eds), The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature

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    Leah Knight

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    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…

  • Mittman, Asa Simon and Peter Dendle (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous

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    Melanie Waters

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    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…

  • Schaffner, Anna Katharina, Modernism and Perversion

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    Susie Christensen

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    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…

  • Ben-Zaken, Avner, Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean,1560-1660

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    Mark Hutchings

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    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…

  • Buckland, Adelene, Novel Science

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    Shelley Trower

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    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…

  • Aït-Touati, Frédérique, Fictions of the Cosmos

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    Jayne Elizabeth Archer

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    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…

  • Hanson, Clare, Eugenics, Literature and Culture in Post-war Britain

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    Josie Gill

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    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…

  • Quiroga, Rodrigo Quian, Borges and Memory

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    Romén Reyes-Peschl

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    Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, Borges and Memory: Encounters with the Human Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). 224pp. Hb £17.95. ISBN 9780262018210. Recent years have arguably seen a sharp increase of interest in cognitive science, psychology and all things ‘neuro’, not only in academic circles but also in popular culture and primers aimed at the layperson. A…

  • Packham, Catherine, Eighteenth-Century Vitalism

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    Jessica Evans

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    Catherine Packham, Eighteenth-Century Vitalism: Bodies, Culture, Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 264pp. Hb £50.00. ISBN 9780230276185. In Eighteenth-Century Vitalism, Catherine Packham considers, in a wider context, a theory of life that is most strongly associated with Romantic-era medicine: the existence of a ‘vital principle’. Packham also denies Romantic claims of the earlier century’s mechanistic view of nature,…

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