Category: Reviews
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Kuhn, Bernhard, Autobiography and Natural Science in the Age of Romanticism
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…
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Faubert, Michelle, Rhyming Reason
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…
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Davidson, Jenny, Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century
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…
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Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence, Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic
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…
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McLean, Steven, H. G. Wells: Interdisciplinary Essays and The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells
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,…
