Category: Reviews
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Sparks, Tabitha, The Doctor in the Victorian Novel
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…
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Coleman, Philip (ed.), On Literature and Science
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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Lightman, Bernard, Victorian Popularizers of Science
Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 564 pp. £31 hb. ISBN 0226481182. If there is one text that should be compulsory reading in science and literature in the nineteenth century, it must surely be this. It may have taken fifteen years to produce but…
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Lightman, Bernard and Aileen Fyfe (eds), Science in the Marketplace
Bernard Lightman and Aileen Fyfe (eds), Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). pp 432. hb £31. ISBN 0226276503. The study of ‘popular science’, one of the biggest growth areas in the history of science, is fraught with definitional difficulties. As Jonathan Topham reminds us in his illuminating…
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Willis, Martin, Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines
Martin Willis, Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines: Science Fiction and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2006), viii + 272pp. £26.50 pb. ISBN 0-87338-857-7. In Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines, Martin Willis presents us with an entertaining and illuminating series of case studies reflecting on the popular imagining of…
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Morse, Deborah Denenholz and Martin A. Danahay (eds.), Victorian Animal Dreams
Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay (eds), Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007). xvi + 281 pp. £55 hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-5511-4. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) A couple of years ago, I set an experimental exercise for students on…
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Hobby, Elaine (ed), The Birth of Mankind
Elaine Hobby (ed.), The Birth of Mankind, Otherwise Named, The Woman’s Book (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009). xxxix + 310 pp. £60 hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-3818-6 (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) The Birth of Mankind, Otherwise Named, The Woman’s Book is a complex work. The book first appeared in 1540 and its…
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Ruddick, Nicholas, The Fire in the Stone
Nicholas Ruddick, The Fire in the Stone: Prehistoric Fiction from Charles Darwin to Jean M. Auel (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009). xvii+265 pp. £31.50 hb. ISBN 978-0-8195-6900-4. The Fire in the Stone is the first comprehensive study in English of what Nicholas Ruddick calls prehistoric fiction or pf, by analogy with science fiction as…
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Baggerman, Arianne and Rudolf Dekker, Child of the Enlightenment
Arianne Baggerman and Rudolf Dekker, Child of the Enlightenment: Revolutionary Europe Reflected in a Boyhood Diary, translated by Diane Webb (Leiden: Brill, 2009). 568 pp. £89.10 hb. ISBN 9004172696. In Child of the Enlightenment, Arianne Baggerman and Rudolf Dekker offer an insight into what they term the ‘paradoxical everyday practices of the Enlightenment’ (2009: 332) through…
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Gordon, Rae Beth, Dances with Darwin, 1875-1910
Rae Beth Gordon, Dances with Darwin, 1875-1910: Vernacular Modernity in France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009). 311 pp. £60 hb. ISBN 0754652434. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) Rae Beth Gordon’s Dances with Darwin examines a unique combination of influences including hystero-epilepsy, Darwinism, and a fascination with Africa which conflated in vivid café-concert performances…
