Category: Reviews

  • Turner, Henry S., The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580-1630

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    John Shanahan

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    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…

  • Stiles, Anne (ed), Neurology and Literature, 1860-1920

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    Deric Corlew

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    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…

  • Turner, Henry S., Shakespeare’s Double Helix

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    Nicolas Correard

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    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…

  • Sawday, Jonathan, Engines of the Imagination

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    Gregory Lynall

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    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…

  • Swirski, Peter, Of Literature and Knowledge

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    Jon Adams

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    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.…

  • Taylor, Jenny Bourne and Sally Shuttleworth (eds), Embodied Selves

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    Jane Darcy

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    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…

  • Lawlor, Clark, Consumption and Literature

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    David E. Shuttleton

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    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…

  • Blair, Kirstie, Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart

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    Amanda Mordavsky Caleb

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    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…

  • Amigoni, David, Colonies, Cults and Evolution

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    Christine Ferguson

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    David Amigoni, Colonies, Cults and Evolution: Literature, Science and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007). 237 pp. £50 hb. ISBN 978-0521884587. The last decade has witnessed an increasingly acrimonious divide between those scholars who seek to claim Darwinism for literature— to expose the discursive, intertextual, and even deconstructive qualities of nineteenth-century evolutionary writing—…

  • Higgitt, Rebekah, Recreating Newton

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    Adelene Buckland

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    Rebekah Higgitt, Recreating Newton: Newtonian Biography and the Making of Nineteenth-Century History of Science (Pickering & Chatto 2007) 286pp. £60 Hb. ISBN 978-1851969067 Until relatively recently historians of science have been sceptical about biography as a mode through which to understand scientific practice, and sceptical about what has been seen as the inevitable partiality of…

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