Category: Reviews

  • 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…

  • Crawford, Robert (ed), Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science

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    Katy Price

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    Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science, edited by Robert Crawford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 234 + xvi pp. £19.99 hb. ISBN 978-0-19-925812-3. This is primarily a book about contemporary poetry, and what poetry can do now, as seen through its engagement with aspects of contemporary science. It is only fleetingly a book about ‘science and poetry’, where the…

  • Gossin, Pamela, Thomas Hardy’s Novel Universe

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    Andrew Radford

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    Pamela Gossin, Thomas Hardy’s Novel Universe: Astronomy, Cosmology, and Gender in the Post-Darwinian World (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007). xiii + 300 pp. £50 hb. ISBN 9780754603368 (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) There were gloomy deserts in those southern skies such as the north shows scarcely an example of […] The inspection…

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