Category: Reviews
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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…
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Quiroga, Rodrigo Quian, Borges and Memory
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…
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Packham, Catherine, Eighteenth-Century Vitalism
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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Tinkler-Villani, Valeria and C.C. Barfoot (eds), Restoring the Mystery of the Rainbow: Literature’s Refraction of Science
Valeria Tinkler-Villani and C.C. Barfoot (eds.), Restoring the Mystery of the Rainbow: Literature’s Refraction of Science, 2 vols (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011) 1106 pp. £198 hb. ISBN 978-90-420-3325-2. Having spent the past 14 months reading, off and on, the two volumes of Restoring the Mystery of the Rainbow, my overall feeling is of…
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Page, Michael, The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H. G. Wells
Michael R. Page, The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H. G. Wells: Science, Evolution, and Ecology (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012) vii+224pp. £49.50 hb. ISBN 978-1-4094-3869-4. BSLS members receive a discount on titles from Ashgate. In the introduction to The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H. G. Wells, Michael Page states that his aim is to…
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Smyth, Karen, Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s Verse
Karen Smyth, Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s Verse (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011). 198 pp. £89.99. ISBN 978-1-4094-0631-0. (BSLS members receive a 20% discount on Ashgate titles.) In this well researched study, Karen Smyth delineates the ways and means of literary expressions of time in the poetry of Lydgate and Hoccleve. The choice of texts automatically…
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Hayden, Judy, Travel Narratives, The New Science, and Literary Discourse, 1569-1750
Judy A. Hayden (ed.), Travel Narratives, The New Science, and Literary Discourse, 1569-1750 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). 244 pp. £55 hb. ISBN: 9781409420422 This volume examines interconnections between science, technique and art. The lines which we now draw between these general fields of knowledge were not established in the early modern period, and the introductory chapter…
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Ferguson, Christine, Determined Spirits
Christine Ferguson, Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American Spiritualist Writing, 1848-1930 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012) x + 230 pp. £70 hb. ISBN 978 0 748 639656 Determined Spirits is part of the Edinburgh University Press series ‘Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture’, whose General Editor is Julian Wolfreys. The aim of…
