Category: Romantic and Victorian

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…

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…