Category: Reviews
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Grimes, Hilary, The Late Victorian Gothic
Hilary Grimes, The Late Victorian Gothic: Mental Science, the Uncanny, and Scenes of Writing (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 188 pp. £55 hb. ISBN 9781409427209 BSLS members are entitled to a 20% discount on Ashgate titles. Click here for details. Hilary Grimes’s The Late Victorian Gothic considers, as the introduction states, ‘the ways in which writers and…
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Hyman, Wendy Beth, The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature
Wendy Beth Hyman (ed.), The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), xi+210 pp. £55.00 hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-6865-7 BSLS members are entitled to a 20% discount on Ashgate titles. Click here for details. As the introduction to this collection of essays notes, a number of real-life automata have been preserved from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The…
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Boyd, Brian, Why Lyrics Last
Brian Boyd, Why Lyrics Last: Evolution, Cognition, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), x+227 pp. £19.95 hb. ISBN 978-0-674-06564-2. In reviewing three evolutionary studies of epic poetry for the BSLS, I was persuaded by Brian Boyd’s On the Origin of Stories that, in the right hands, an evolutionary perspective on literature could…
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Lynall, Gregory, Swift and Science
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by
Allan Ingram
Gregory Lynall, Swift and Science: The Satire, Politics, and Theology of Natural Knowledge, 1690-1730 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), xii + 209 pp. Hb £50.00 ISBN 9780230343641. No period before the modern age saw such dizzying scientific progress as that covered by Greg Lynall’s book. In all fields of scientific knowledge, but most strikingly, and challengingly, in physics,…
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Lawlor, Clark, From Melancholia to Prozac: A History of Depression
Clark Lawlor, From Melancholia to Prozac: A History of Depression (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 288 pages. £14.99. ISBN 978-0-19-958579-3. BSLS members are entitled to a 20% discount on academic titles published by Oxford University Press. Click here for details. What’s in a word? In his celebrated Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, William Styron…
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Levine, George, Darwin the Writer
George Levine, Darwin the Writer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) xvii+272pp. £19.99 hb ISBN 9780199608420 BSLS members are entitled to a 20% discount on academic titles published by Oxford University Press. Click here for details. All of the world is a rastro, Darwinian eyes will trace it, Darwinian exuberance and wonder precede and follow from it. (217) The…
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Levine, George, Darwin Loves You
George Levine, Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 336 pp. £17.95 hb. ISBN: 978-0691126630 Chapter 1 available online at Princeton University Press site. George Levine’s new book Darwin Loves You takes its title from a bumper sticker, a half-knowing and half-urgent counterpoint to the ubiquitous ‘Jesus Loves You’ emblazoned on the backs…
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Vetter, Lara, Modernist Writings and Religio-Scientific Discourse: H.D., Loy, and Toomer
Lara Vetter, Modernist Writings and Religio-Scientific Discourse: H.D., Loy, and Toomer (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), xi + 219 pp. £58.00 hb. ISBN 9780230621220 Modernist literature has long been seen in the light of its break from religious orthodoxies and situated in the context of philosophical accounts of secularism by Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, James Frazer,…
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Stiles, Anne, Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century
Anne Stiles, Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 274 pp. £55 hb. ISBN 9781107010017. ‘What is perhaps most striking about late-nineteenth-century theories about insanity and genius is their persistence in modern culture’ (154) writes Anne Stiles, in Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century.…
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Bruckner, Lynne and Daniel Brayton (eds), Ecocritical Shakespeare
Lynne Bruckner and Daniel Brayton (eds), Ecocritical Shakespeare (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 280 pp. £55 hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-6919-7. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) Ecocritical Shakespeare is a volume of 13 essays that explores both an ecocritical reading of Shakespeare and a Shakespearean redefinition of ecocriticism by locating and analyzing environmental and ecopolitical…
