Category: Romantic and Victorian

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…

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…