Category: Reviews

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…