Category: Romantic and Victorian

Karin Koehler, Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication: Letters, Telegrams and Postal Systems (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2016) xii + 246 pp. £58.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-3-319-29101-7 Thomas Hardy was a prolific writer of letters. Although his correspondence was seemingly exhausted with the seven volume collection of 1978-88, a further volume of the author’s letters was released in…

Laura White, The Alice Books and the Contested Ground of the Natural World(Oxford: Routledge 2017) xvi + 250 pp. £105 Hb. ISBN: 9781138630826 The application of scholarly detective work to the life and literature of Lewis Carroll has resulted in an influx of research on his exploration of science. The idea that Alice’s Adventures in…

Anna Kornbluh, Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (New York: Fordham University Press 2014) 232 pp. $50.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780823254972 As the world slowly recovered from the devastating financial crisis of 2008, accounts of the catastrophe reflexively blamed investors for recklessly abusing byzantine financial instruments culminating in global hysteria. While everyday market…

Marit Grøtta, Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and Nineteenth-Century Media (London: Bloomsbury 2015) 216 pp. £27.09 EPUB, PDF, £31.09 Pb, £88.09 Hb. ISBN: 9781628924404 Much has been made, over the years, of the nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire’s criticism of photography, especially in his review of the Salon of 1859. On the…

Monika Elbert and Bridget M. Marshall (eds), Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century (Farnham: Ashgate 2013) 282 pp. £37.99 Pb, £110.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781409447702 Through its engaging and multiple approaches, Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century offers original insights on the development of the Gothic…

Jordan Kistler, Arthur O’Shaughnessy, A Pre-Raphaelite Poet in the British Museum (Oxford: Routledge 2016) 199pp. £110.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781472467355 I approached this book (as I suspect many readers will) with a keen interest in interactions between Victorian science and literature, but little knowledge of Arthur O’Shaughnessy (1844-81). As such, I was at first intrigued by…

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…