Category: Romantic and Victorian

Wendy Moore, The Mesmerist: The Society Doctor Who Held Victorian London Spellbound (London: Orion Publishing 2017) 320 pp. £18.99 Hb ISBN:9781474602297 Prior to 1780 Europeans largely believed that what we now call mental illness was a result of demonic possession, with a demon inhabiting the body of the afflicted and mechanically operating them like a…

Janina Wellmann, The Form of Becoming: Embryology and the Epistemology of Rhythm, 1760-1830, translated by Kate Sturge (New York: Zone Books 2017) 432 pp. $34.95 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-935408-76-5 In her recent book Forms Caroline Levine calls for a broad definition of form as ‘all shapes and configurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and difference’…

Katharina Boehm, Charles Dickens and the Sciences of Childhood: Popular Medicine, Child Health and Victorian Culture (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan 2013) x, 236 pp. £45.99 PDF, EPUB, £55 Pb, £58 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-137-36249-0 In her introduction, Katharina Boehm cites Thomas Kuhn and Bruno Latour as pioneers in the study of ‘knowledge-producing practices, undertaken by many different social…

Theresa M Kelley, Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press 2012) 400 pp. $58.00 EPUB MOBI PDF, $58.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781421407609 Theresa M. Kelley’s Clandestine Marriage is a triumphant piece of scholarship that not only offers impressive interdisciplinary coverage of its subject, but, importantly, reconsiders botany during the Romantic era…

Angelique Richardson (ed), After Darwin: Animals, Emotions, and the Mind (Amsterdam: Rodopi 2013) xvi + 369 pp. €112.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-90-420-3747-2 ‘After Darwin, something changed,’ declares Angelique Richardson in her introduction to this wide-ranging and insightful book. ‘The disciplines, never far apart to begin with, were now brought into newly self-conscious dialogue.’ (4). The book…

Dermot Coleman, George Eliot and Money: Economics, Ethics and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2014) vii + 226 pp. $20.00 PDF, £20.00 Pb, £57.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781107057210 Dermot Coleman introduces George Eliot and Money: Economics, Ethics and Literature with the reminder that history contains powerful lessons for those willing to heed them. Rather self-deprecatingly, he…

Gillian Beer, Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 2016) 296 pp. $35.00 Hb. ISBN 978-0-226-04150-6 Serious Lewis Carroll scholars have long since abandoned the simplistic image of Charles Dodgson as an unworldly eccentric who isolated himself by retreating into a world of childhood and, specifically,…

Jane Ford, Kim Edwards Keates, and Patricia Pulham (eds), Economies of Desire at the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Libidinal Lives (Oxford: Routledge 2016) 214 pp. £110.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781138826342 This invigorating collection asserts itself as ‘the first sustained study to interrogate how and why issues of sexuality, desire, and economic processes intersect in the literature…

Alex Murray, Landscapes of Decadence: Literature and Place at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2016) 235 pp. $80.00 PDF, £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-107-16966-1 Alex Murray’s Landscapes of Decadence considers the intersection between landscape, location and identity in the Decadent fin de siècle. Beginning with a reading of Arthur Symons’s impressionistic poem ‘At…

Nicholas Daly, The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City : Paris, London, New York (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press 2015) 272 pp. £22.99 Pb., $78.00 PDF, £62.00 Hb. ISBN : 978-1-107-09559-5 While the significance of nineteenth-century urbanization is well recognized, Nicholas Daly’s new book explores the larger, though related, issue of demographic change over the…