Category: Reviews
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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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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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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…
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Brown, Laura, Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination
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Candice Kent
Laura Brown, Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 176 pp. £22.95 hb. ISBN 9780801448287. Laura Brown’s fascinating book is based on the premise that the eighteenth century is the locus of a novel engagement with animal-kind that continues to influence literature…
