Category: Reviews

  • 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…

  • Sleigh, Charlotte, Six Legs Better

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    Janine Rogers

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    Charlotte Sleigh, Six Legs Better: A Cultural History of Myrmecology (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP, 2007). 302 pp.  £36.50 hb. ISBN 0-8018-8445-4. We might be surprised to discover how many of our beliefs about the mind, society, economics and communication are indebted to research on ants, through the field of myrmecology. Charlotte Sleigh’s Six Legs Better:…

  • Armstrong, Philip, What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity

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    David Allan Feller

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    Philip Armstrong, What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2007). 256 pp. £ 60 hb, £18.99 pb. ISBN 978-0415358385 (hb)/978-0415358392 (pb) A book using the terms ‘animal’ and ‘modernity’ in its title almost intrinsically assumes the burden of evolution. In What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity, Philip Armstrong suggests that…

  • George, Samantha, Botany, Sexuality and Women’s Writing

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    Margaret Olszewski

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    Samantha George, Botany, Sexuality and Women’s Writing, 1760-1830: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). 288 pp. £55 hb. ISBN 978-0719076978. Sam George’s Botany, Sexuality and Women’s Writing 1760-1830 picks up where the work of science and gender pioneers like Barbara T. Gates, Anne Shteir and Londa Schiebinger left off; but rather…

  • Mahood, M. M., The Poet as Botanist

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    C. M. Jackson-Houlston

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    M. M. Mahood, The Poet as Botanist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). xi + 269 pp; 8 illustrations. £50.00 hb.  ISBN 978-0521862363. This eminently readable labour of love offers some of the serendipity of an anthology,  but with a structured critical focus.  The author is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Kent but…

  • Roberts, Adam, The History of Science Fiction

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    Patrick Parrinder

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    Adam Roberts, The History of Science Fiction (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). xvii + 368 pp. £15.99 pb. ISBN 978-0230546912. Ever since the definitive Clute and Nicholls Encyclopedia of Science Fiction appeared some fifteen years ago, there has been a need—now amply supplied by Adam Roberts—for a new narrative history of the genre…

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