Category: Reviews

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…