Category: Reviews
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Graham, Peter W., Jane Austen and Charles Darwin: Naturalists and Novelists
Peter W. Graham, Jane Austen and Charles Darwin: Naturalists and Novelists (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). 214 pp. £50 hb. ISBN 978-0754658511. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) In Jane Austen and Charles Darwin: Naturalists and Novelists, Peter W. Graham brings together two distinct trends in the study of literature and science. On the…
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Musselman, Elizabeth Green, Nervous Conditions: Science and the Body Politic in Early Industrial Britain
Elizabeth Green Musselman, Nervous Conditions: Science and the Body Politic in Early Industrial Britain (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006). 276 pp. £41.25 hb. ISBN 0791466795. If masculinity and science epitomised energy and rationality during Britain’s Industrial Revolution, why and how did so many natural philosophers suffer nervous illnesses? How do these experiences of…
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Ruston, Sharon (ed), Literature and Science
Sharon Ruston (ed.), Literature and Science. Vol. 61. Essays and Studies 2008. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008). 188 pp. £30.00. ISBN 978-1843841784. Special offer: Order Literature and Science through the BSLS and receive a 25% discount. Just fill in this form (pdf) and send it to Boydell & Brewer to receive your discount. In his…
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Brake, Mark L. and Neil Hook, Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science
Mark L. Brake and Neil Hook, Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science (Macmillan, 2008), 265pp. £16.99 hb. ISBN 978-0-230-01980-5. When Mark Brake and Neil Hook claim, in Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science, that Johannes Kepler’s Somnium had “grasped the bond between life forms and habitat” two centuries before…
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Burney, Ian, Poison, Detection and the Victorian Imagination
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Laurie Garrison
Ian Burney, Poison, Detection and the Victorian Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). 224pp. £35 hb. ISBN 0719073766. The middle decades of the nineteenth century are well-known to be a period where popular culture was fascinated with deviant behaviours. These were the decades that saw the height of popularity of sensation novels and sensation drama, genres rife with…
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Turner, Henry S., The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580-1630
Henry S. Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580-1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 342 pp. £67 hb. ISBN 978-0199287383. This is a highly readable and substantial contribution to our understanding of early modern English drama. Turner’s project is a convincing challenge to anachronistic views of the separation of the arts and…
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Stiles, Anne (ed), Neurology and Literature, 1860-1920
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Deric Corlew
Anne Stiles (ed.), Neurology and Literature, 1860-1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 240 pp. £48 hb. ISBN 978-0230520943. In the late nineteenth century, the term “neurology” referred not only to the medical study of the nervous system, but also encompassed a broad range of fields from neuroscience to clinical psychology. This collection of eight essays is thus…
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Turner, Henry S., Shakespeare’s Double Helix
Henry S. Turner, Shakespeare’s Double Helix (London: Continuum, 2007). 129 pp. £ 45 hb/£12.99 pb. ISBN 978-0826491190 (hb)/978-0826491206 (pb). Coming from a talented scholar in Shakespearean studies, author of an in-depth study on the role of mathematics and craftsmanship in the construction of the Renaissance theatrical practice (The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical…
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Sawday, Jonathan, Engines of the Imagination
Jonathan Sawday, Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007). 424 pp. £65 hb; £18.99 pb. ISBN 978-0415350624. Engines of the Imagination is an acute re-assessment of the status of technology in Renaissance Europe, tracing the permeation of the world of the machine into poetic, political and philosophical…
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Swirski, Peter, Of Literature and Knowledge
Peter Swirski, Of Literature and Knowledge: Explorations in Narrative Thought Experiments, Evolution, and Game Theory (London: Routledge, 2007), 196pp. £60 hb/£18.99 pb. ISBN 978-0415420594. Fictions – novels in particular – embed so many incidental details in the process of telling their stories that they could act as repositories of information about particular places and times.…
