Category: Romantic and Victorian

Jordan Kistler, The British Public and the British Museum: Shaping and Sharing Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh University Press, 2026) viii + 307 pp. £95.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781399523752 In the early 1920s, George McCready Price visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York and he did not like what he saw. As…

Anastasia Klimchynskaya, Science Fiction and the Modern World: The Emergence of a Genre in a Revolutionary Age (Liverpool University Press, 2026) 206 pp. $130.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781836244905 Anastasia Klimchynskaya’s Science Fiction and the Modern World: The Emergence of a Genre in a Revolutionary Age is a significant intervention in science fiction studies that reconsiders the origins of…

Daniel Williams, The Art of Uncertainty: Probable Realism and the Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024) 346 pp. £89.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781009436113 Daniel Williams’s The Art of Uncertainty explores some of the ways in which nineteenth-century fiction drew on and critiqued emerging legal, mathematical, philosophical and scientific ideas. As such, the book joins the…

Matthew L. Reznicek, Tales of Health: Illness, Disability, and Citizenship in the Romantic National Tale (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2026) 256 pp. £160.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781805966807 In this detailed, multi-text study of the National Tale genre, Matthew Reznicek demonstrates the enduring importance of the categories of illness, body and health to ideas of nationhood and…

Meegan Kennedy, Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy: Beautiful Mechanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025) 480 pp. £117.50 Hb. ISBN: 9780198939009 In Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy: Beautiful Mechanism Meegan Kennedy clearly establishes the terrain not only for her own ongoing multi-book project on Victorian microscopy but especially for anyone working on the literature of microscopy.…

Sandhya Shetty, Imperial Pharmakon: Writing and Medicine in the Long Nineteenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan: 2025) xiv + 448 pp. £95.50 eBook £119.99 Hb. ISBN: 978-3-031-90877-4 (eBook) Sifting through an eclectic ensemble of writing, Imperial Pharmakon (2025) by Sandhya Shetty invites its readers into the colonial Indian landscape through the intertwined histories of writing and medicine…

Mike Jay, Free Radicals: How a Group of Romantic Experimenters Gave Birth to Psychedelic Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025) 382 pp. + 27 bw illustrations, $22.00 PB, ISBN: 9780300282610. Mike Jay’s Free Radicals: How a Group of Romantic Experimenters Gave Birth to Psychedelic Science purports to be a ‘revised and updated edition’ of…

Elfed Huw Price, William Lawrence and the Organ of Mind: The Theology, Medicine and Politics of the Brain (London: UCL Press, 2025) 240 pp. £20.29 Pb. ISBN: 9781787357907 Today, the assertion that ‘the brain is the organ of mind’ is treated as an almost self-evident scientific truth. Yet, as Elfed Huw Price demonstrates in his…

John MacNeill Miller, The Ecological Plot: How Stories Gave Rise to a Science (University of Virginia Press, 2024) 228 pp. $110 Hb. $32.50 Pb. ISBN: 9780813951775 John MacNeill Miller’s The Ecological Plot (2024) offers an ambitious contribution to the intellectual history of ecology by tracing the narrative forms through which ecological thinking first became imaginable.…

Hugh Epstein, Hardy, Conrad and the Senses (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020) 312 pp. £27.99 Ebook ISBN: 9781474449885 Hugh Epstein’s book offers a persuasive and deftly managed reconsideration of Hardy and Conrad, through which they emerge as ‘compatible’ writers and as particularly eminent figures in late-Victorian culture more broadly (18). Indeed, Hardy, Conrad and the…