Category: Reviews
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Cummins, Juliet and David Burchell (eds), Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England
Juliet Cummins and David Burchell (eds), Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 256 pp. £60 hb. ISBN 0754657817. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) This volume brings together ten scholars from various fields in early modern studies to discuss the ways in which science, literature and rhetoric contributed…
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Crossley, Robert, Imagining Mars
Robert Crossley, Imagining Mars: A Literary History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011). xvii + 353 pp. £34.95. ISBN 978-0-8195-6927-1. Robert Crossley begins his literary history of Mars with a trip to the Clark telescope at Wellesley College during the opposition of 2003. At a time when our neighbouring planet was closer to Earth than…
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Wallwork, Jo and Paul Salzman (eds), Early Modern Englishwomen Testing Ideas
Jo Wallwork and Paul Salzman (eds), Early Modern Englishwomen Testing Ideas (Burlington and Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2011), 158 pp. £50 hb. ISBN: 978 1 4094 1969 3. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) Jo Wallwork and Paul Salzman’s Early Modern Englishwomen Testing Ideas is a collection of essays about how women writers from…
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Garratt, Peter, Victorian Empiricism
Peter Garratt, Victorian Empiricism: Self, Knowledge, and Reality in Ruskin, Bain, Lewes, Spencer, and George Eliot (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010), 244pp. £34.95 hb. ISBN 9780838642665 Peter Garratt is certainly right to point out from the outset of his book just how slippery the term “empiricism” really is. I remember the sense of conceptual…
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Leane, Elizabeth, Reading Popular Physics
Elizabeth Leane, Reading Popular Physics: Disciplinary Skirmishes and Textual Strategies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 208 pp. £55 hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-5850-4. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) A critical consideration of the literary, scientific, and cultural contexts in which popular physics writing intervenes, Elizabeth Leane’s Reading Popular Physics: Disciplinary Skirmishes and Textual Strategies establishes surveyors’…
