Category: Reviews
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Peterson, Kaara L., Popular Medicine, Hysterical Disease, and Social Controversy in Shakespeare’s England
Kaara L. Peterson, Popular Medicine, Hysterical Disease, and Social Controversy in Shakespeare’s England(Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 217 pp. £55. hb. ISBN 9780754669937 (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) Popular Medicine, Hysterical Disease, and Social Controversy in Shakespeare’s England provides an important contribution to understandings of early modern medical knowledge. The value of Peterson’s…
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Killeen, Kevin, Biblical Scholarship, Science and Politics in Early Modern England: Thomas Browne and the Thorny Place of Knowledge
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by
Mary Morrissey
Kevin Killeen, Biblical scholarship, science and politics in early modern England: Thomas Browne and the thorny place of knowledge (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 268 pp. £55 hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-5730-9. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) This thought-provoking monograph is one of several book-length publications on the writings of Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) in…
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Ahearn, Edward J., Urban Confrontations in Literature and Social Science, 1848-2001
Edward J. Ahearn, Urban Confrontations in Literature and Social Science, 1848-2001: European Contexts, American Evolutions (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), ix+236 pp. £55 hb. ISBN 978- 0754668824. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) Aside from its invocation of two critical and violent years, the title of this book is not enticing, yet what lies…
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Yi, Dongshin, A Genealogy of Cyborgothic
Dongshin Yi, A Genealogy of Cyborgothic: Aesthetics and Ethics in the Age of Posthumanism(Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 164pp. Hb £55.00. ISBN 978-1-4094-0039-4. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) Fearing the advent of cyborgs and genetically crafted organisms, opponents of technoscience typically shift their objections from rational bases to aesthetic ones: computers may one…
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Bauer, Heike, English Literary Sexology
Heike Bauer, English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion, 1860-1930 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 232 pp. £50 hb. ISBN 978-0230221635. This is, undoubtedly, an interesting and persuasive book. At first sight it could be seen to cover what has, of late, become familiar territory in late nineteenth-century studies – degeneration, sexology, the New Woman – and yet…
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Blackwell, Stephen H., The Quill and the Scalpel: Nabokov’s Art and the Worlds of Science
Stephen H. Blackwell, The Quill and the Scalpel: Nabokov’s Art and the Worlds of Science (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2009). pp 276. £37.26 hb. ISBN 978-0-8142-1099-4 . Interviewing Vladimir Nabokov for a 1964 edition of Playboy magazine, the American futurist Alvin Toffler raised the question of the place of the ‘irrational’ in what…
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Holmes, John, Darwin’s Bards
John Holmes, Darwin’s Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). xiv + 288 pp. £60.00, hb. ISBN: 9780748639403. Recently I did a Google Books search for the keywords ‘Darwin’ and ‘poetry’. Fittingly, John Holmes’s Darwin’s Bards topped the list. Published the year of Darwin’s bicentenary—and, of course,…
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Reiss, Benjamin, Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture
Benjamin Reiss, Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 237. £34.50 hb. ISBN: 0-226-70963-9. £14 pb ISBN: 0-226-70964-7. When Dickens first toured America in 1842, he decided to visit many of the country’s public charity institutions. At Boston he looked around the State Hospital…
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Boyd, Brian, On the Origin of Stories
Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), xxii + 540 pp. £25.95 hb. ISBN 978-0-674-03357-3. George Levine, winner of the BSLS book prize for 2008, reviews On the Origin of Stories, shortlisted for the BSLS book prize for 2009: The recent upsurge…
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Jackson, Noel, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry
Noel Jackson, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). pp. 288+xiv. £50.00 hb. ISBN 978-0521869379. It is by now a long time since the supposed hostility of Romantic poets to science was shown to be a myth—an extrapolation of Wordsworth’s ‘we murder to dissect’ made by C. P. Snow, among others,…
