Category: Romantic and Victorian

Shawn Malley, From Archaeology to Spectacle in Victorian Britain: The Case of Assyria, 1845-1854 (Farnham: Ashgate 2012) 220pp. £95 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-4094-2689-9 In this detailed and rigorously researched study, Shawn Malley examines Austen Henry Layard’s excavation of Assyria, and its subsequent impact upon literary, cultural, religious and scientific spheres. Concurrently, he grapples with the imperialistic…

Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic (Farnham: Ashgate 2010) 174 pp. £95.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781409400561 The cover art for Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet’s study elucidates her topic with striking precision. Grant Wood’s American Gothic is an starting point for Monnet’s discussion of the American gothic literary tradition. Much of the introduction maps…

Jennifer Phegley, John Cyril Barton and Kristin N. Huston, eds,  pref by David S Reynolds, Transatlantic Sensations (Oxford: Routledge 2012) 302 pp. Hb, £95.00. ISBN: 9781409427155 This book sets out to examine narrative and artistic representations of sensation. Choosing and using diverse approaches to the subject matter, this collection of essays demonstrates the strongly interdependent relationship between…

Yasmin Solomonescu, John Thelwall and the Materialist Imagination (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2014) xii, 226 pp. Hb, £58.00. ISBN: 978-1-137-42613-0 In July 2014, the John Thelwall Society and the University of Notre Dame in London celebrated Thelwall, the poet, elocutionist, and political agitator, at 250. The event was triumphant in spirit, and the organisers and attendees relished…

Suzanne Keen, Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination (Columbus: Ohio State University Press 2014) xiii + 236 pp. Hb $64.95 , Pb $25.95 , CD $14.95. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1249-3 Suzanne Keen begins her book by discussing the sexologist Havelock Ellis’s review of ‘Hardy’s Novels’ from 1883.1 She highlights his observation that when anonymously published some nine…

  Melissa Anne Raines, George Eliot’s Grammar of Being (London: Anthem Press, 2011), xxiv + 208 pp. Hb £60.00, Pb £25.00. ISBN: 9781783080748 Melissa Anne Raines’s George Eliot’s Grammar of Being emulates, if not exceeds, Eliot’s famously careful attention to phrasing and grammar. Raines takes her cue from a line in Eliot’s introduction to Felix…

Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Willburn (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult (Ashgate: Farnham, 2012) 454 pp. Hb £95.00. ISBN: 9780754669128 The Victorian fascination with spiritualism and the occult still sits rather awkwardly within our understanding of an age that consciously defined itself through narratives of scientific, technological and intellectual modernisation.…

Allen MacDuffie, Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).  ix + 305 pp. Hb £60.00, PDF $76.00 ISBN: 9781107064379  The problems relating to energy production and ecological sustainability which we face as a global community are, according to Allen MacDuffie, both material and representational. Nature itself imposes material limits on our capacity…

Daniel Brown, The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense (Cambridge University Press 2013) xii + 310 pp. Hb £59.99, Pb £18.99, PDF $24.00. ISBN 9781107023376 Daniel Brown’s The Poetry of Victorian Scientists begins with a counterintuitive premise: how does nonsense serve as a foundation for knowledge, allowing for the development of increasingly professional and…