Category: Reviews
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Gold, Barri J., ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science
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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Garrison, Laurie, Science, Sexuality and Sensation Novels
Laurie Garrison, Science, Sexuality and Sensation Novels: Pleasures of the Senses (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 248pp, £50.00 hb, ISBN 9780230203167 Of all Victorian literary genres, sensation fiction is perhaps the one which has leant itself most readily to interdisciplinary readings concerning its engagement with contemporary science and pseudo-science. The depiction of extreme mental states such…
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Jones, Jeanette Eileen and Patrick B. Sharp (eds), Darwin in Atlantic Cultures
Jeanette Eileen Jones and Patrick B. Sharp (eds), Darwin in Atlantic Cultures: Evolutionary Visions of Race, Gender, and Sexuality (New York and London: Routledge, 2010), 305 pp. £85 hb. ISBN 978-0-415-87234-8. Darwin in Atlantic Cultures offers a collection of essays valuable to the reader interested in “the reach of the Darwinist episteme” (1) generally and to those…
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Hodgkin, Katherine (ed), Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England: The Autobiographical Writings of Dionys Fitzherbert
Katherine Hodgkin (ed.), Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England: The Autobiographical Writings of Dionys Fitzherbert (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). 290pp. £65.00hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-3018-0. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) In Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England, Katherine Hodgkin explores the complex relationship between religion and madness and the early…
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Smajić, Srdjan, Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists, and Jill Galvan, The Sympathetic Medium
Srdjan Smajić, Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 262pp. £50 hb. ISBN 9780521191883. Jill Galvan, The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, The Occult, and Communication Technologies, 1859-1919 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010). 216pp. £27.95hb. ISBN 9780801448010. The obvious connection between Smajić’s Ghost-Seers and Galvan’s Sympathetic Medium is…
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Schmitt, Cannon, Darwin and the Memory of the Human
Cannon Schmitt, Darwin and the Memory of the Human: Evolution, Savages, and South America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). xii +243pp. £53 hb. ISBN 9780521765602. Cannon Schmitt’s Darwin and the Memory of the Human is a complex and ambitious study that never entirely convinces but often stimulates and provokes. In outline, the book consists of…
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Perloff, Marjorie and Craig Dworkin (eds), The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound
Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin (eds), The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 343pp. £48.50 hb, ISBN 9780226657414; £18.00 pb, ISBN 9780226657431. As I was finishing Majorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin’s edited collection my one year old daughter was playing with a noisy toy of the type that regularly…
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Clarke, Bruce and Manuela Rossini (eds), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science
Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini (eds), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science (London and New York: Routledge, 2010 [dated 2011]), 550pp. Hb £125.00. ISBN 978-0-415-49525-7. In reviewing The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science, I find myself faced with the challenge of how to discuss a book that, while difficult to get into, becomes…
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Shuttleworth, Sally, The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840-1900
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by
Jon Adams
Sally Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840-1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), xii+497 pp. £35.00 hb. ISBN 978-0199582563. Sally Shuttleworth needs no introduction to BSLS members; indeed, delegates at the 2007 conference in Birmingham heard some of the material from this new book in her plenary address…
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Jenkins, Alice, Space and the ‘March of Mind’: Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain, 1815-1850
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by
Bernard Lightman
Alice Jenkins, Space and the ‘March of Mind’: Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain, 1815-1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 268 pp. £69.00 hb. ISBN 978-0-19-920992-7. Alice Jenkins’ ambitious study of British literary and scientific culture in the nineteenth century breaks new ground in at least two respects. The influential work of Gillian Beer…
