Category: Reviews
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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.…
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Taylor, Jenny Bourne and Sally Shuttleworth (eds), Embodied Selves
Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830-1890, edited by Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998;repr. 2003). 456pp. £29 pb. ISBN 978-0198710424. Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth’s invaluable Embodied Selves achieves something quite different from Hunter and Macalpine’s seminal anthology Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry: 1535-1860 (1963). Taylor and Shuttleworth make…
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Lawlor, Clark, Consumption and Literature
Clark Lawlor, Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006). 248pp. £45 hb. ISBN 13: 978-0-230-02003. Clark Lawlor’s scholarly account of ‘consumption narratives’ is to be recommended as a well-informed and engaging contribution to the burgeoning field of interdisciplinary studies addressing the literary representation of disease. Consumption and Literature sets out…
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Blair, Kirstie, Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart
Kirstie Blair, Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 288 pp. £56 hb. ISBN13: 978-0-19-927394-2 Of all the –ologies discussed in relation to Victorian literature—neurology, psychology, gynaecology, and even toxicology—cardiology is strangely absent from the list. Given the unhealthy Victorian interest in disease and death, it is surprising that…
