Category: Reviews
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Brooke, Keith (ed), Strange Divisions & Alien Territories
Keith Brooke (ed.), Strange Divisions & Alien Territories: The Sub-Genres of Science Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), xiv + 222 pp. £18.99 pb. ISBN 9780230249677. What makes up a genre? This volume proposes to examine science fiction (sf) by scrutinising its component parts, offering twelve introductory essays on sub-genres from cyberpunk to space opera. The…
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Ruston, Sharon, Shelley and Vitality
Sharon Ruston, Shelley and Vitality. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 231 pp. £18.99 pb. ISBN. 978-1-137-01112-1. Midway through her study of Percy Bysshe Shelley and vitality, now issued in paperback, Sharon Ruston claims that the poet was ‘linked publicly and intellectually with this band of men who questioned the existence of a soul, the need…
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Holmes, John (ed), Science and Modern Poetry
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…
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Rignall, John et al. (eds), Ecology and the Literature of the British Left
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…
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Totaro, Rebecca, The Plague Epic in Early Modern England
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…
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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…
