Category: Romantic and Victorian
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Speitz, Michelle, The Romantic Sublime and Representations of Technology
Michelle Speitz, The Romantic Sublime and Representations of Technology (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2024) 216 pp. £80 Hb. ISBN: 9781835536704 In The Romantic Sublime and Representations of Technology, Michelle Speitz ‘offers the first full-length study of the sublime stories British Romantic writers told about technology’ (p. 1). This is a welcome and original study, casting…
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Hoiem, Elizabeth Massa, The Education of Things: Mechanical Literacy in British Children’s Literature
Elizabeth Massa Hoiem, The Education of Things: Mechanical Literacy in British Children’s Literature, 1762-1860 (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2024) 328 pp. $30.95 Pb. ISBN: 9781625347558 Winner of the 2025 Justin G. Schiller Prize for the best bibliographic study of pre-1951 children’s literature. Elizabeth Massa Hoiem’s winning of this influential award is completely warranted.…
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Fallon, Richard, Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature: How the ‘Terrible Lizard’ Became a Transatlantic Cultural Icon
Richard Fallon, Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature: How the ‘Terrible Lizard’ Became a Transatlantic Cultural Icon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021) 283 pp. £75 HB. ISBN: 9781108834001 This is a book that will, I suspect, resonate deeply with the interests of the BSLS. Dinosaurs must surely be the most popular science topic…
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Orr, Mary, Sarah Bowdich Lee (1791-1856) and Pioneering Perspectives on Natural History
Mary Orr, Sarah Bowdich Lee (1791-1856) and Pioneering Perspectives on Natural History (London: Anthem Press, 2024) 294 pp. £80.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-1083998-609-3 The last two decades have seen an almost exponential advance in our knowledge and understanding of women’s many contributions to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European science. Building on groundbreaking works in the 1990s by…
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Miller, Hugh, The Old Red Sandstone, or New Walks in an Old Field, edited with a critical study and notes by Michael A. Taylor and Ralph O’Connor
Hugh Miller, The Old Red Sandstone, or New Walks in an Old Field, edited with a critical study and notes by Michael A. Taylor and Ralph O’Connor (Edinburgh: National Museums Scotland, 2023), 2 vols: 684 pp. £30.00. Sb. ISBN: 9781910682258 The most well-known nineteenth-century British palaeontologist is probably Mary Anning, the working-class Lyme Regis collector…
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Wong, Amy R., Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk
Amy R. Wong, Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023) xii+228 pp. $70.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781503635173 Amy R. Wong’s Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk is a provocative and ambitious intervention in Victorian studies, postcolonial theory, and literary…
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Barr, Philippa Nicole, Uncertainty and Emotion in the 1900 Sydney Plague
Philippa Nicole Barr, Uncertainty and Emotion in the 1900 Sydney Plague (Cambridge Elements: Histories of Emotions and the Senses: Cambridge University Press, 2024) 71 pp. £17.00 Pb. £49.99 Hb. ISBN: 9781108821063 In late 2019 Philippa Barr from the Australian National University signed the contract to write a book about how a pandemic affected the city…
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Fyfe, Aileen and Kidd, Colin (eds), Beyond the Enlightenment: Scottish Intellectual Life, 1790-1914
Aileen Fyfe and Colin Kidd (eds), Beyond the Enlightenment: Scottish Intellectual Life, 1790-1914 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023) xii + 273 pp. £85.00 Hb. £24.99 Pb. £24.99 Ebook. ISBN: 9781474493031 David Hume, Adam Smith, Joseph Black, Dugald Stewart, Adam Ferguson, John Leslie, James Hutton, William Cullen, James Watt. These very prominent and influential philosophers, economists,…
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Bailes, Melissa, Regenerating Romanticism: Botany, Sensibility, and Originality in British Literature, 1750-1830
Melissa Bailes, Regenerating Romanticism: Botany, Sensibility, and Originality in British Literature, 1750-1830 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2023) 282 pp. $115.00 Hb. $32.50 Pb. ISBN: 9780813949406 Melissa Bailes’s Regenerating Romanticism: Botany, Sensibility, and Originality in British Literature, 1750-1830 makes an important intervention in Romantic studies by calling into question the truism that Romantic poets rejected…
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Jameson, Conor Mark, Finding W. H. Hudson: The Writer Who Came to Britain to Save the Birds
Conor Mark Jameson, Finding W. H. Hudson: The Writer Who Came to Britain to Save the Birds (London: Pelagic Publishing, 1923), 360 pp. £17.99 Pb. ISBN: 9781784273286 It is almost a given that any review or essay (and there is precious few of either) of the work of W. H. Hudson (1841-1922) will lament the…
