Category: Reviews
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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…
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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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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…
