Category: Romantic and Victorian

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…

Anne DeWitt, Moral Authority, Men of Science and the Victorian Novel (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press 2013) 290 pp. £62.00 Hb., £19.99 Pb., $24.00 PDF. ISBN: 9781107036178 The introduction to Anne DeWitt’s Moral Authority, Men of Science and the Victorian Novel proclaims that it will focus on ‘characters who practice or study science, fictional conversations about…

Vicky Albritton and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Green Victorians: The Simple Life in John Ruskin’s Lake District (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2016) 209 pp.  £28.00 Hb.  ISBN: 978-0-226-339986 Vicky Albritton and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson open their account of The Simple Life in John Ruskin’s Lake District, as their book is subtitled, with the work of…

Tina Young Choi, Anonymous Connections: The Body and Narratives of the Social in Victorian Britain (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2016) 192 pp. $65.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-472-11972-1 We live, Tina Young Choi reminds us, in an age of proliferating virtual networks, pervasive economic globalisation, and the transmission of diseases such as Ebola and influenza across…

David Spanagel, DeWitt Clinton and Amos Eaton: Geology and Power in Early New York (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2014) 288 pp. $54.95 Hb. ISBN: 9781421411040 In DeWitt Clinton and Amos Eaton, David Spanagel offers biographical treatments of the well-known New York politician DeWitt Clinton and the lesser-known geologist Amos Eaton and politician Stephen Van…