Category: Reviews
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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…
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Hagen, Margareth and Randi Koppen and Margery Vibe Skagen (eds), The Art of Discovery: Encounters in Literature and Science
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Jon Adams
Margareth Hagen, Randi Koppen and Margery Vibe Skagen (eds), The Art of Discovery: Encounters in Literature and Science (Aarhus and Copenhagen: Aarhus University Press, 2010), 275pp. € 33.95 pb. ISBN 978-87-7934-5010. A wealth of metaphors has been produced to describe the complex relationship between literature and science, each bearing its own set of implications. C.…
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Alt, Christina, Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature
Christina Alt, Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). x+229 pp. £50 hb. ISBN 978-0-521-19655-0. In Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature Christina Alt explores the shift which took place around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries within the life sciences, and which consisted primarily in the movement…
