Category: Reviews
-
Neville, Graham, Coleridge and Liberal Religious Thought: Romanticism, Science and Theological Tradition
Graham Neville, Coleridge and Liberal Religious Thought: Romanticism, Science and Theological Tradition (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010), x+210 pp. £54.50 hb. ISBN 978-1848850897. Coleridge’s theological writings are less well known than they should be, partly because literary critics are aware of their lack of expertise in the field. Yet the young Coleridge movingly…
-
McConnell, Frank, The Science of Fiction and the Fiction of Science
Frank McConnell, The Science of Fiction and the Fiction of Science: Collected Essays on SF Storytelling and the Gnostic Imagination, ed. by Gary Westfahl (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2009). xii+212 pp. £28.95 hb. ISBN 978-0-7864-3722-1. The J. Lloyd Eaton conferences on science fiction and fantasy have been held annually at the University of California,…
-
Fromm, Harold, The Nature of Being Human
Harold Fromm, The Nature of Being Human: From Environmentalism to Consciousness (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). x+299 pp. £18.00 hb. ISBN 9780801891298. Walter Benjamin maintained that the writer should use ‘I’ only in personal letters, but in The Nature of Being Human Harold Fromm does not hesitate to personalise his eco-critical discourse, producing a…
-
Plock, Vike, Joyce, Medicine, and Modernity
Vike Plock, Joyce, Medicine, and Modernity (Miami: University of Florida Press, 2010). pp 187. £57.95 hb. ISBN 081303423X James Joyce’s interest in all kinds of medicine—past and present, formal and folk—leaves multiple traces on his writing. Dubliners (1914) is bounded by illness, from its opening on Father Flynn’s fatal ‘third stroke’ to its close on…
-
Holmes, Richard, The Age of Wonder
Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (London: Harper Collins, 2008), pp. xxi + 554. £25. ISBN 978-0-00-714952-0 The best feature of this fascinating survey of Romantic science is Richard Holmes’s skill in bringing to utterly believable life the domestic circumstances in which scientific discovery was…
-
Gooday, Graeme, Domesticating Electricity
Graeme Gooday, Domesticating Electricity: Technology, Uncertainty and Gender, 1880-1914 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008). 292 pp. £60 hb. ISBN 978 1 85196 580 9. Scholars of the history of technology will be justifiably pleased by this informative survey of the slow but steady progression of electricity from an uncertain and luxurious alternative to generating power…
-
Rudy, Jason R., Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics
Jason R. Rudy, Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2009). xiii + 222 pp. £40.50 hb. ISBN 0821418823. Electric Meters—the subject of which should not be confused with devices you may (or may not) have fitted to your power mains at home—is an ambitious and welcome addition to the growing field…
-
Söderqvist, Thomas (ed.), The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography
Thomas Söderqvist (ed.), The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). xv + 270 pp. £60 hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-5181-9. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) If the modern impulse to write biography—split between seriousness and celebrity, the cerebral and the gossipy—can be traced from James Boswell’s systematic courting and recording…
-
Knight, Leah, Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England
Leah Knight,Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England: Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009). pp xvi +163. £55.00. hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-6586-1 (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) Leah Knight’s Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England explores the unexpected ways in which plants and texts were imagined in…
-
Höfer, Bernadette, Psychosomatic Disorders in Seventeenth-Century French Literature
Bernadette Höfer, Psychosomatic Disorders in Seventeenth-Century French Literature (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 245 pp. £55 hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-6621-9 (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) In her fascinating book Psychosomatic Disorders, Höfer explores the ‘dialogue’ between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries on the subject of the relationship of mind and body (7). Neurobiologists, among…
