Category: Reviews

  • Allard, James Robert, Romanticism, Medicine, and the Poet’s Body

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    Clark Lawlor

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    James Robert Allard, Romanticism, Medicine, and the Poet’s Body, The Nineteenth Century Series (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 174 pp. £50 hb. ISBN 0-7546-5891-7. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) James Allard’s title promises much: a consideration of the poet’s body in Romanticism no less. When one looks inside the book one finds that…

  • Levine, George, Realism, Ethics and Secularism

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    John Holmes

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    George Levine, Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge: CUP, 2008). ix+283 pp. £50 hb. ISBN 0-521-88526-3. In Realism, Ethics and Secularism, George Levine reaffirms once again his position as one of the most thoughtful and relevant critics working on literature and science over the last thirty years. (For my review…

  • Carroll, Victoria, Science and Eccentricity

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    Laurie Garrison

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    Victoria Carroll, Science and Eccentricity: Collecting, Writing and Performing Science for Early Nineteenth-Century Audiences (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008). 254 pp. £60 hb. ISBN 1851969403. Victoria Carroll’s Science and Eccentricity: Collecting, Writing and Performing Science for Early Nineteenth-Century Audiences explores an astounding range of material from anecdotes about alligator wrestling to pastoral idylls about the…

  • Das, Nandini (ed), Robert Greene’s Planetomachia

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    Kirk Melnikoff

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    Nandini Das, ed. Robert Greene’s Planetomachia (1585) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). lv +168pp. £55.00 hb. ISBN 0-7546-5661-6. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) A fitting contribution to Ashgate’s new “Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity” series, Nandini Das’s edition of Robert Greene’s Planetomachia (1585) affords access to a significant cultural artifact from…

  • Radick, Gregory, The Simian Tongue

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    Christine Ferguson

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    Gregory Radick, The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate About Animal Language. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 575 pp. £31 hb. ISBN 0226702243. Gregory’s Radick’s much-welcome monograph recovers and adroitly lays bare the shifting evolutionary implications, institutional fortunes and intellectual capital of one of the most fascinating experimental paradigms in the history of science: the…

  • Elwick, James, Styles of Reasoning in the British Life Sciences

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    Jim Endersby

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    James Elwick, Styles of Reasoning in the British Life Sciences: Shared assumptions, 1820–1858 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007). 233 pp. £60 hb. ISBN 1851969209. James Elwick’s book is a fine-grained analysis of the diverse methodologies and philosophies of British ‘life researchers’ in the decades before the Origin of Species. ‘Life researcher’ is his umbrella term for…

  • Knellwolf, Christa and Jane Goodall (eds), Frankenstein’s Science

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    Tim Fulford

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    Frankenstein’s Science: Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780-1830, ed. Christa Knellwolf and Jane Goodall (Aldershot and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2008), xi + 225 pp. £55 hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-5447-6 (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) This welcome collection of essays rightly places its emphasis on the scientific contexts in which Frankenstein was…

  • Spiller, Elizabeth, Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature

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    Judy A. Hayden

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    Elizabeth Spiller, Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature. The Art of Making Knowledge, 1580-1670 (2004. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2007). 232 pp. ₤56.00 hb/₤24.99 pb. ISBN 978-0-521-83086-7 (hb)/978-0-521-03768-6(pb). In Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature, Elizabeth Spiller addresses the manner in which literature and science arose out of the same philosophical tradition and asserts that the interest of…

  • Jacyna, L. S., Medicine and Modernism

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    Amanda Mordavsky Caleb

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    L. S. Jacyna, Medicine and Modernism: A Biography of Sir Henry Head, Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century series, 6 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008) 368 pp. £60 hb. ISBN 13: 978-1-85-196907-4 Students of the humanities and the sciences (and those who dare to cross the boundaries) are very familiar with the arguments regarding…

  • Glendening, John, The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels

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    Helena Ifill

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    John Glendening, The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels: An Entangled Bank (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007), 225pp, £55.00 hb, ISBN 9780754658214 (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) In his exploration of late-Victorian fiction’s engagement with the complexities and confusions produced by Darwinism, John Glendening focuses on novels which critics have long acknowledged to be influenced…

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