Category: Reviews
-
Marchitello, Howard, The Machine in the Text: Science and Literature in the Age of Shakespeare and Galileo
Howard Marchitello, The Machine in the Text: Science and literature in the Age of Shakespeare and Galileo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 236 pp, £55 hb, ISBN 978-0-19-960805-8. The phrase ‘the two cultures’ has become a somewhat lazy shorthand for a supposed philosophical division between those who seek to understand the world largely through the…
-
Sarasohn, Lisa T., The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish
Lisa T. Sarasohn, The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy during the Scientific Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 251 pp. £39 hb. ISBN 0-8018-9443-3. Previously dismissed by historians of science, Margaret Cavendish’s philosophy has only recently begun to receive serious critical enquiry. Lisa Sarasohn’s book will encourage further study through its…
-
Colligan, Colette and Margaret Linley (eds), Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century and Alex Goody, Technology, Literature and Culture
Colette Colligan and Margaret Linley, eds., Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century: Image, Sound, Touch. The Nineteenth Century (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 302 pp. £ 60.00 hb. ISBN 978-1-4094-0009-7. Alex Goody, Technology, Literature and Culture. Themes in 20th and 21st Century Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 193 pp. £ 15.99 pb. ISBN…
-
Bould, Mark and Sherryl Vint, The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction
Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint, The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction (London: Routledge, 2011), xi + 247pp. £15.99 pb. ISBN 9780415435710 If Literature and Science may be said to have such a thing as a ‘project’, then Science Fiction’s place in it remains unclear: on the one hand, the very name ‘Science Fiction’ seems…
-
Budd, Adam (ed), John Armstrong’s ‘The Art of Preserving Health’
Adam Budd (ed.), John Armstrong’s ‘The Art of Preserving Health’: Eighteenth-Century Sensibility in Practice (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), xxii + 302 pp. £65.00 hb. ISBN: 978-0-7546-6306-5. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) Dr Adam Budd has provided a critical edition of John Armstrong’s 1,700-line four-book poem, The Art of Preserving Health (1744), complete…
-
Maude, Ulrika, Beckett, Technology and the Body
Ulrika Maude, Beckett, Technology and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 209pp. £50 hb. ISBN 9780521515375./£25.99 pb. ISBN 9780521181501. In Beckett, Technology and the Body, Ulrika Maude offers a remarkable re-evaluation of the role of the body – in terms of both embodiment and disembodiment – in Beckett’s oeuvre. By masterfully combining close readings…
-
Dawson, Gowan, Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability
Gowan Dawson, Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), xii + 286 pp. £64 ISBN: 9780521872492 Charles Darwin did not much care for literature. His autobiography confessed an intolerance of poetry, a love of middlebrow fiction and, in later life, feelings of nausea when reading Shakespeare. It is, therefore, perhaps ironic that…
-
Golston, Michael, Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science
Michael Golston, Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 272. £38.00. ISBN 978-0-231-14276-2. Different climates and different bloods have different needs, different spontaneities, different reluctances, different ratios between different groups of impulses and unwillingness, different constrictions of throat, and all these leave trace in the language, and…
-
Wood, David Houston, Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England
David Houston Wood, Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 199pp. £55.00hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-6675-2. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) In Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England, David Houston Wood explores the relationship between the explicit embodiment in the humoral self and the consideration of how…
-
O’Connor, Ralph, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856
Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 448 pp. £ 31 hb. ISBN 9780226616681. The geologist, like the historian, is constantly faced with the difficulties of incomplete evidence. Gaps in strata spanning thousands or millions of years, partial skeletons, and limited information…
