Category: Reviews

  • Kuhn, Bernhard, Autobiography and Natural Science in the Age of Romanticism

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    Amber K. Regis

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    Bernhard Kuhn, Autobiography and Natural Science in the Age of Romanticism: Rousseau, Goethe, Thoreau (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 171 pp. £55 hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-6166-5. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) Bernhard Kuhn’s engaging study draws life writing into current academic debates concerning the historical relationship between the arts and sciences. Contesting C.P Snow’s…

  • Faubert, Michelle, Rhyming Reason

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    Jane Darcy

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    Michelle Faubert, Rhyming Reason: The Poetry of Romantic-Era Psychologists, The Enlightenment World: Political and Intellectual History of the Long Eighteenth Century Series (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), 304 pp. £60.00 hb, ISBN 9781851969555 In Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, Hunter and Macalpine noted the curiosity that many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century psychiatric physicians wrote verse. They…

  • Davidson, Jenny, Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century

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    Carolyn D. Williams

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    Jenny Davidson, Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century(New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), xx+292 pp. £22.50 hb. ISBN 978-0-231-13878-9 (book), ISBN 978-0-231-51111-7 (ebook). Jenny Davidson’s original synthesis appeals equally to specialists in eighteenth-century literature and science, and readers interested in the history of the life sciences, agriculture, education or language. With elegance and…

  • Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence, Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic

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    Verity Burke

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    Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009). 224pp. £75 hb. ISBN 0708322239. Teresa Goddu’s assertion that ‘Gothic registers its culture’s anxieties’ frames an important literary theme in the nineteenth century. With medical theories such as physiology that reduced ‘man to “matter”’ (p. 5), scientific revelations such as Darwin’s…

  • McLean, Steven, H. G. Wells: Interdisciplinary Essays and The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells

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    Elizabeth Throesch

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    Steven McLean (ed.), H.G. Wells: Interdisciplinary Essays (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 184 pp. £19.99pbk. ISBN: 978-1443811262. Steven McLean, The Early Fiction of H.G. Wells: Fantasies of Science (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 242pp. £50hbk. ISBN: 978-0230535626. H.G. Wells: Interdisciplinary Essays (first published in hardback in 2008) is the product of an annual H.G. Wells Society symposium,…

  • Reid, Julia, Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle

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    Martin Willis

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    Julia Reid, Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 241pp. £18.99 pb. ISBN: 978-0-230-23032-3. Julia Reid’s Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle has this year been published in paperback, no doubt partly as a result of very favourable reviews when it first appeared in 2006. We…

  • Bowler, Peter J., Science for All

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    Rachel Crossland

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    Peter J. Bowler, Science for All: The Popularisation of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). xii+339 pp. £31 hb. ISBN 978-0-226-06863-3. In Science for All: The Popularisation of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain Peter Bowler seeks to redress the balance as far as studies of popular science are concerned, investigating…

  • Cordle, Daniel, States of Suspense

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    Charles Thorpe

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    Daniel Cordle, States of Suspense: The Nuclear Age, Postmodernism and United States Fiction and Prose (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). ix+172pp. £50.00 hb. ISBN 978 0 7190 7712 8. Daniel Cordle’s brilliant analysis of North American literature during the Cold War focuses not on images of nuclear destruction, but instead on descriptions of nuclear anxiety.…

  • Sparks, Tabitha, The Doctor in the Victorian Novel

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    Andrew Mangham

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    Tabitha Sparks, The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices, Nineteenth Century Series (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 177pp. £99.95 hb. ISBN: 978-0-7546-6802-2 (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) When Queen Victoria ascended to the throne in 1837, practitioners of medicine were enjoying new prestige and dominance; as population figures soared, so too did…

  • Coleman, Philip (ed.), On Literature and Science

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    Jon Adams

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    Philip Coleman (ed.), On Literature and Science: Essays, Reflections, Provocations (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), 270pp. £50hb. ISBN: 978-1846820717. Reading a medievalist on the relations between The Canterbury Tales and sci-fi is not an enticing prospect: “Chaucer, technology and the rise of science fiction in English” sounds like the most egregious piece of shoe-horning since Cinderella’s…

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