Category: Romantic and Victorian

Kathleen Frederickson, The Ploy of Instinct: Victorian Sciences of Nature and Sexuality in Liberal Governance (New York: Fordham University Press 2014) 236pp.  $75 Hb, $26 Pb. ISBN: 9780823262526 Kathleen Frederickson’s The Ploy of Instinct: Victorian Sciences of Nature and Sexuality in Liberal Governance is a dexterous negotiation of Victorian ‘instinct’ both as an impetus for progress…

Richard D Fulton and Peter H Hoffenberg, eds, Oceania and the Victorian Imagination: Where All Things Are Possible (Oxford: Routledge 2013) 220 pp. £34.99 Pb, £100.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-1138249417 In their thoughtful introduction to this wide-ranging volume of essays, Richard Fulton and Peter Hoffenberg set the stage for the blurry boundaries of Pacific Islands in…

Jon Klancher, Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2013)  x + 307 pp. £19.99 Pb , EPUB £18.99, £62 Hb. ISBN: 9781107029101 Jon Klancher’s analysis of Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age turns on something of a paradox: that institutions invented by the…

Katja Guenther, Localization and its Discontents: A Genealogy of Psychoanalysis and the Neuro Disciplines (Chicago: Chicago University Press 2015) 310 pp. $35.00 PDF, Hb. ISBN: 9780226288208 Investigating the relationship between psychoanalysis and neurology, Localization and its Discontents takes the reader back to the nineteenth-century German-speaking world by providing a historical approach to the link between…

Will Tattersdill, Science, Fiction and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2016) 220 + x pp. $80.00 PDF, £64.99 Hb. ISBN: 9781107144651 Will Tattersdill’s engaging study of the periodical and its role in the creation of science fiction as a genre aims much wider in scope than a survey of the general periodical…

Anne Green, Changing France: Literature and Material Culture in the Second Empire (London: Anthem Press 2011) 208 pp. £70 Hb, £25 Pb. ISBN: 9780857287779 The French Second Empire (1852-1870) always had a problem with its public image. Now associated with froth, superficiality and excess, its beginnings were dark and disturbing. Louis-Napoleon, the nephew of the…

Jeremy Davies, Bodily Pain in Romantic Literature (Oxford: Routledge 2014) 228 pp. £95.00 Hb, £28.00 Pb. ISBN: 9780415842914 The subject of bodily pain is an important and fruitful area of romantic scholarship that Davies gives his full attention in this ambitious and rigorous study. Critics such as Richard Sha, Steven Bruhm and Joanna Bourke have…

Aviva Briefel, The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015) 236 pp. £ 67.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781107116580 The second book published in Victorian Hand studies, Aviva Briefel’s The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination picks up where Peter Capuano’s recent monograph leaves off,1 contributing a needed perspective on intersections between race…

Gowan Dawson, Show Me the Bone: Reconstructing Prehistoric Monsters in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2016) 480pp. $50.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780226332734 ‘“Give me the bone, and I will describe the animal”’ (1), Cuvier is supposed to have declared. Dawson’s monograph examines the rise and fall of Cuvier’s law of correlation, which…

Anna Henchman, The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2014) xviii+294 pp. £60 Hb. ISBN 978-0-19-968696-4 Tennyson and Hardy may have gazed at the heavens with a rare intensity, but astronomy provided an important imaginative resource for many poets, novelists and other writers during…