Category: Reviews
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Taylor, Stuart J., Mathematics in Postmodern American Fiction
Stuart J. Taylor, Mathematics in Postmodern American Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) ix+308 pp. £109.99 Hb. £89.99 ebook. ISBN: 978-3-031-48670-8 As mathematics appears unreasonably effective in defining and solving problems, we now observe its arresting spread, in real time, into each and every aspect of our life, through its various forms and incarnations – models, data,…
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Christensen, Joel P., Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things
Joel P. Christensen, Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025) x+234 pp. £20.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780300269239 Fifteen years ago I wrote a review for the BSLS of three books that sought to make profound claims about epic, narrative and living things. Two of them – Jonathan Gottschall’s The Rape…
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Hoiem, Elizabeth Massa, The Education of Things: Mechanical Literacy in British Children’s Literature
Elizabeth Massa Hoiem, The Education of Things: Mechanical Literacy in British Children’s Literature, 1762-1860 (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2024) 328 pp. $30.95 Pb. ISBN: 9781625347558 Winner of the 2025 Justin G. Schiller Prize for the best bibliographic study of pre-1951 children’s literature. Elizabeth Massa Hoiem’s winning of this influential award is completely warranted.…
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Fallon, Richard, Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature: How the ‘Terrible Lizard’ Became a Transatlantic Cultural Icon
Richard Fallon, Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature: How the ‘Terrible Lizard’ Became a Transatlantic Cultural Icon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021) 283 pp. £75 HB. ISBN: 9781108834001 This is a book that will, I suspect, resonate deeply with the interests of the BSLS. Dinosaurs must surely be the most popular science topic…
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Orr, Mary, Sarah Bowdich Lee (1791-1856) and Pioneering Perspectives on Natural History
Mary Orr, Sarah Bowdich Lee (1791-1856) and Pioneering Perspectives on Natural History (London: Anthem Press, 2024) 294 pp. £80.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-1083998-609-3 The last two decades have seen an almost exponential advance in our knowledge and understanding of women’s many contributions to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European science. Building on groundbreaking works in the 1990s by…
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Miller, Hugh, The Old Red Sandstone, or New Walks in an Old Field, edited with a critical study and notes by Michael A. Taylor and Ralph O’Connor
Hugh Miller, The Old Red Sandstone, or New Walks in an Old Field, edited with a critical study and notes by Michael A. Taylor and Ralph O’Connor (Edinburgh: National Museums Scotland, 2023), 2 vols: 684 pp. £30.00. Sb. ISBN: 9781910682258 The most well-known nineteenth-century British palaeontologist is probably Mary Anning, the working-class Lyme Regis collector…
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Clayton, Jay, Literature, Science, and Public Policy: From Darwin to Genomics
Jay Clayton, Literature, Science, and Public Policy: From Darwin to Genomics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023) 290 pp. £85.00 Hb. Open Access via Cambridge Core. ISBN: 9781009263528 Jay Clayton’s valuable book takes a range of texts that may seem familiar to BSLS readers and remakes them as the foundations for a new set of approaches…
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Wong, Amy R., Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk
Amy R. Wong, Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023) xii+228 pp. $70.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781503635173 Amy R. Wong’s Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk is a provocative and ambitious intervention in Victorian studies, postcolonial theory, and literary…
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Evens, Aden, The Digital and Its Discontents
Aden Evens, The Digital and Its Discontents (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2024) 264 pp. $116.00 Hb. $29.00 Pb. ISBN: 9781517916329 Changing one’s laptop can be likened to moving into a new house. The rooms would be located differently, and walls would not immediately have the frames one is so used to seeing. One’s body feels…
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Langbein, Julia, Fuchs, Anne and Cosgrove, Mary (eds) Framing Aging: Interdisciplinary Perspectives for Humanities and Social Sciences Research
Julia Langbein, Anne Fuchs and Mary Cosgrove (eds) Framing Aging: Interdisciplinary Perspectives for Humanities and Social Sciences Research (London: Bloomsbury, 2024) 264 pp. £76.50 Hb. ISBN: 9781350341418 Framing Aging is the latest in Bloomsbury’s Studies in the Humanities, Ageing and Later Life series, boasting an interdisciplinary response to the rising field of gerontology, or the…
