Category: Reviews

  • Cummins, Juliet and David Burchell (eds), Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England

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    Felicity Henderson

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    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…

  • Crossley, Robert, Imagining Mars

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    Patrick Parrinder

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    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…

  • Wallwork, Jo and Paul Salzman (eds), Early Modern Englishwomen Testing Ideas

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    Jennifer Munroe

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    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…

  • Garratt, Peter, Victorian Empiricism

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    Richard Somerset

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    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…

  • Leane, Elizabeth, Reading Popular Physics

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    Jenni Halpin

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    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’…

  • Fleming, James Dougal (ed), The Invention of Discovery, 1500-1700

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    Leah Knight

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    James Dougal Fleming (ed), The Invention of Discovery, 1500-1700 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 228 pp. £55. ISBN 978-0-7546-6841-1. This collection aims to provoke a variety of eponymous discoveries and inventions about meanings held by the book’s keywords in the early modern world. In so doing it raises questions not only about the salience of these concepts…

  • Matus, Jill L., Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction

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    Katherine Inglis

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    Jill L Matus, Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 264 pp. £59 hb. ISBN 9780521760249. The title Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction does not quite do justice to the ambitious remit of this study, which engages, in innovative fashion, with two other hot topics in…

  • Paul, Harry W., Henri de Rothschild, 1872-1947: Medicine and Theater

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    Kirsten Shepherd-Barr

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    Harry W. Paul, Henri de Rothschild, 1872-1947: Medicine and Theater (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 322 pp. £70 hb. ISBN 978-1-4094-0515-3. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) As the subtitle of this meticulously researched biography indicates, there was much more to the Rothschilds than wine and banking. Henri de Rothschild, the great-grandson of the…

  • Liu, Lydia H., The Freudian Robot

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    Alistair Brown

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    Lydia H. Liu, The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 302pp. £15.50 pb. ISBN 978-0-226-48683-3. What is the most powerful and widespread language in the world today? Is it English? Mandarin? Lydia Liu would probably argue that it is not one specific tongue, but the…

  • Sleigh, Charlotte, Literature and Science

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    Vike Plock

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    Charlotte Sleigh, Literature and Science, Outlining Literature Series (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 232 pp. £16.99 pb. ISBN: 9780230218178. Charlotte Sleigh’s book Literature and Science, published in Palgrave Macmillan’s Outlining Literature Series, offers a valuable new take on the history of the mutually responsive relationship between scientific and literary cultures in the last three hundred years.…

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