Category: Reviews

  • Holmes, John (ed), Science and Modern Poetry

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    Jeffrey Wainwright

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    John Holmes (ed.), Science and Modern Poetry: New Directions (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012). 248 pp. £65 hb. ISBN 9781846318092 ‘Science’ and ‘poetry’ are often seen as two poles, an instance of the oppositions of ‘science’ and ‘art’, or ‘science and ‘the humanities’. There has been a long and indecisive skirmish between the two categories…

  • Rignall, John et al. (eds), Ecology and the Literature of the British Left

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    David Stewart

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    John Rignall, H. Gustav Klaus and Valentine Cunningham (eds.), Ecology and the Literature of the British Left: The Red and the Green (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). xi + 167 pp. £60 hb. ISBN 978 1 4094 1822 1. BSLS members are entitled to a 20% discount on Ashgate titles. Click here for details. This collection of sixteen essays…

  • Totaro, Rebecca, The Plague Epic in Early Modern England

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    David Walker

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    Rebecca Totaro, The Plague Epic in Early Modern England: Heroic Measures, 1603-1721 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012). £65.00, 348pp. ISBN. 9781-1-4094-41-17-7. BSLS members are entitled to a 20% discount on Ashgate titles. Click here for details. In The Wonderful Year (1603) Thomas Dekker paints a vivid and chilling tableau of the plague dead in which we are…

  • Grimes, Hilary, The Late Victorian Gothic

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    Martin Willis

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    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…

  • Hyman, Wendy Beth, The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature

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    Eleanor Sandry

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    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…

  • Boyd, Brian, Why Lyrics Last

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    John Holmes

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    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…

  • Lynall, Gregory, Swift and Science

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    Allan Ingram

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    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,…

  • Lawlor, Clark, From Melancholia to Prozac: A History of Depression

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    Angela Woods

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    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…

  • Levine, George, Darwin the Writer

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    Katherine Ford

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    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…

  • Levine, George, Darwin Loves You

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    John Holmes

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    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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