Category: Romantic and Victorian

Mark Offord, Wordsworth and the Art of Philosophical Travel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2016) £64.99 Hb. ISBN: 9781107155589 From its title, Mark Offord’s book appears to offer a unique reworked reading of Wordsworth’s ‘pictures of Nature, Man and Society’ (1) as an art of travel. When Offord allows himself the space in which to directly…

Suzanne Bailey, Cognitive Style and Perceptual Difference in Browning’s Poetry (London: Routledge 2010) 200pp. £39.99 Pb, £110.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780415874779 In her study, Cognitive Style and Perceptual Difference in Browning’s Poetry, Suzanne Bailey suggests that Robert Browning suffered from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, more commonly known as ADHD. She uses this hypothesis to explain several…

Marc Flandreau, Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange: a Financial History of Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2016) 416 pp. $35.00 Pb, $105.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780226360447 In Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange:, Marc Flandreau argues that the economic value of ‘truth’ underpins the development of anthropology as its own discipline in the nineteenth century,…

Markus Iseli, Thomas De Quincey and the Cognitive Unconscious (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2015) 248 pp. $90 Hb. ISBN: 9781137501073 In Thomas De Quincey and the Cognitive Unconscious, Markus Iseli confronts an historiographic gap between contemporary cognitive science and the role of the unconscious in the work of Thomas De Quincey. Iseli argues that modern…

Jan Golinski, The Experimental Self: Humphry Davy and the Making of a Man of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2016) 256 pp. $30.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780226351360 One of the early biographies of Humphry Davy (1778–1829) was entitled The Mercurial Chemist; mercurial being a not inappropriate description of his personality. In this latest biographical study…

Barbara K. Seeber, Jane Austen and Animals (London: Routledge 2013) 162 pp. £95.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781409456049 In 1792, Thomas Taylor, the Platonist (1758-1835), unconvinced by contemporary tracts advocating greater equality among humans, and alarmed by the violence and disorder similar views were producing in France, published A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes (1792). It…

Karl Bell, The Magical Imagination: Magic and Modernity in Urban England 1780-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012) 308 pp. £68.40 PDF/EPUB, £72.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781107002005 The relationship between magic, in all its diverse forms, and modernity, in its equally diverse forms, has become the subject of an ever-growing field of research. Magic itself is no…

Jonathan Strauss, Human Remains: Medicine, Death and Desire in Nineteenth-Century Paris (New York: Fordham University Press 2012) 410 pp. $40.00 Pb, $105.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780823233793 Human Remains is an intimately gory book that chronicles the dramatically dynamic relationship that nineteenth-century Parisians had with the dead. In an expertly detailed investigation of multiple levels of Parisian…

Devin Griffiths, The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature between the Darwins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2016) xii + 339 pp. $55 EPUB, MOBI, PDF, $55 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-4214-2076-9 In The Age of Analogy, Devin Griffiths sets out to achieve several things at once. Firstly, he proposes a history of interactions between science and…

Karen Bourrier, The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-Victorian Novel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2015) 174pp. $35.00 Pb, $65.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-472-07248-4 Karen Bourrier makes a bold and somewhat unexpected argument in The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-Victorian Novel. She reveals how the disabled man was…