Category: Reviews

  • 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.…

  • Byrne, Katherine, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination

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    Clark Lawlor

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    Katherine Byrne, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 223pp. £55 hb. ISBN 978–0–521–76667–8. It has become something of a cliché to observe just how destructive consumption or pulmonary tuberculosis was in the nineteenth century and before: one in four people suffered from it, so writers like Thomas Beddoes claimed. Arguably…

  • Ketabgian, Tamara, The Lives of Machines

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    Barri Gold

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    Tamara Ketabgian, The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2011), 252pp. Pb £30.50. ISBN 0472051407. This fascinating and challenging book stages an intervention not only in our habitual readings of the Victorian industrial novel, but also in our larger sense of how and…

  • Barnett, Ryan and Serena Trowbridge (eds), Acts of Memory: The Victorians and Beyond

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    Folkert Degenring

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    Ryan Barnett and Serena Trowbridge (eds), Acts of Memory: The Victorians and Beyond (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 169pp. £34.99 pb. ISBN 978-1-4438-2567-2. As Ryan Barnett and Serena Trowbridge point out in their introduction to Acts of Memory: The Victorians and Beyond, the discourse of memory permeates the literature of the Victorian period. Memory does not…

  • Kennedy, Meegan, Revising the Clinic

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    Kate Gazzard

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    Meegan Kennedy, Revising the Clinic: Vision and Representation in Victorian Medical Narrative and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), 261 pp. $39.95 hb ISBN 978-0-8142-1116-8 Meegan Kennedy’s first book, Revising the Clinic: Vision and Representation in Victorian Medical Narrative and the Novel, offers a head-on and provocative exploration into how Victorian medical practitioners…

  • Vaught, Jennifer C. (ed), Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England

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    Carolyn D. Williams

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    Jennifer C. Vaught (ed.), Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), xv + 243 pp. £55. ISBN 9780754669487 (hbk); ISBN 9780754697121 (ebk). (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) Jennifer Vaught is to be congratulated on producing a fascinating, well-coordinated collection of essays by authors…

  • Hesketh, Ian, The Science of History in Victorian Britain

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    Richard Somerset

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    Ian Hesketh, The Science of History in Victorian Britain: Making the Past Speak (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011) 240pp. £60 hb ISBN 978 1 84893 126 8. As all students of cultural history are aware, the way we categorise thinkers depends on the criterion by which we look at them. Victorian historiography is no exception. In…

  • Richter, Virginia, Literature After Darwin

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    Will Abberley

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    Virginia Richter, Literature After Darwin: Human Beasts in Western Fiction, 1859-1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2011), 272pp, £50 hb, ISBN: 9780230273405 Darwin’s evolutionary theories shattered traditional ideas of human identity. Common origins with the brutes reduced the human from fallen angel to rising ape; and even this image of progressive development was undermined by random mutation and…

  • Gold, Barri J., ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science

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    Alice Jenkins

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    Barri J. Gold, ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010) 336 pp. £22.95 hb. ISBN 978-0-262-01372-7 Thermodynamics is the only area of the physical sciences that has received more than occasional attention from studies of Victorian literature and science, where the focus has more commonly been on biology, geology and…

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