Category: Reviews
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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…
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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…
