Category: Romantic and Victorian

Rosa Mucignat, Realism and Space in the Novel, 1795-1869: Imagined Geographies (Oxford: Routledge 2013) 192 pp. £95.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781409450559 The title of Rosa Mucignat’s Realism and Space in the Novel 1795-1869: Imagined Geographies only palely suggests the nature of this careful, well documented, and very pertinent literary study. Mucignat’s book reflects the hybrid nature…

Will Abberley, English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, 1850-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015) 247 pp. $80.00 PDF, £64.99 Hb. ISBN: 9781107101166 Will Abberley’s English Fiction and the Evolution of Language 1850-1914, as the title suggests, explores the development of the English language through fiction, arguing that the influence of fiction on the development…

Mark Frost, The Lost Companions and John Ruskin’s Guild of St George: A Revisionary History (London: Anthem Press 2014) 264pp. Hb £60.00. ISBN: 9781783082834 In 1871 John Ruskin launched a fund for the establishment of a new society. Ruskin envisaged a utopia based on medieval agrarianism, one which was community-minded and which opposed the advances…

William Hughes, That Devil’s Trick: Hypnotism and the Victorian Popular Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2015) 256 pp. Hb £70. ISBN 978-0-7190-7483-7 It is the sign of a good book when the reviewer’s main criticism is a quibble with the accuracy of its title. Despite the suggested focus on hypnotism, the main emphasis throughout is…

Valerie Purton (ed), Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers: Explorations in Victorian Literature and Science (New York and London: Anthem Press 2013) 192 pp. £70.00 Hb, £25.00 Pb. ISBN 9780857280763 The real author of Tennyson’s poems was in fact Charles Darwin; or so asserted Algernon Charles Swinburne in a spoof published in the Nineteenth Century in 1888.…

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…