Category: Reviews

  • Blackwell, Stephen H., The Quill and the Scalpel: Nabokov’s Art and the Worlds of Science

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    Peter Johnston

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    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…

  • Holmes, John, Darwin’s Bards

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    Jason David Hall

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    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,…

  • Reiss, Benjamin, Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture

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    Andrew Mangham

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    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…

  • Boyd, Brian, On the Origin of Stories

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    John Holmes

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    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…

  • Jackson, Noel, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry

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    Tim Fulford

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    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,…

  • Neville, Graham, Coleridge and Liberal Religious Thought: Romanticism, Science and Theological Tradition

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    Thomas Woodman

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    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

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    Patrick Parrinder

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    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

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    Roger Ebbatson

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    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

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    Katy Mullin

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    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

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    Tim Fulford

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    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…

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