Category: Romantic and Victorian

Larry Duffy, Flaubert, Zola, and the Incorporation of Disciplinary Knowledge (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), xvii + 261 pp. £58 Hb, £45.99 PDF. ISBN 978-1-137-29753-2 In his latest study, Larry Duffy meticulously traces the weave of knowledge as it appears in the fabric of the nineteenth century novel. In the texts of those two great icons…

Eckart Voigts, Barbara Schaff and Monika Pietrzak-Franger (eds.), Reflecting on Darwin (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014) xii + 231 pp. £95 Hb, £90.25 Kindle. ISBN 978-1-4724-1407-6 Scholars on Darwin and Darwinism will be disappointed with how little of Darwin himself there is in this book.  Setting out to discover the significance of Darwin today (5), this book…

Dewey W. Hall, Romantic Naturalists, Early Environmentalists: An Ecocritical Study, 1789-1912 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014) 240pp. £65.00 Hb, PDF, ePUB. ISBN 978-1-4094-2264-8 The current field of ecocriticism is expansive and vibrant.  As environmental crises continue to demand urgent attention and material response, the role of literature in shaping this response has come under increasing scrutiny.  In…

Sarah C Alexander, Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable (London: Routledge, 2015) 256pp. £95 Hb, £27.99 Mobi, £34.99 EPUB. ISBN 9781848935662 Sarah C. Alexander’s Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable is yet another valuable effort to rethink the issue of literature and science in ways other than that of the “Two…

James Secord, Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 320 pp. £18.99 Hb. ISBN: 9780199675265. James Secord’s Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age (Oxford University Press, 2014) takes as its focus seven key texts, including Humphrey Davy’s…

Gavin Budge, Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural: Transcendent Vision and Bodily Spectres, 1789-1852 (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2013).  viii + 295 pp.  £63 Hb, EPUB, PDF. ISBN 978-0-230-23846-6 Literary critics and historians of medicine will learn much from Gavin Budge’s wide-ranging and erudite study, which argues that Romantic medicine influenced writers from Coleridge through Hazlitt to…

Alexander Dick, Romanticism and the Gold Standard: Money, Literature and Economic Debate in Britain 1790-1830 (Houndmills: Palgrave 2013). 280 pp. £55 Hb, EPub, PDF. ISBN 978-1-137-29293-3 Until recently, scholarship on Romanticism’s relationship with economic and monetary issues has only scantly been addressed, since it has been considered a topic with which the Romantics themselves had…

Dometa Wiegand Brothers, The Romantic Imagination and Astronomy: On All Sides Infinity (Palgrave 2015), Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, 216pp. £55 hb. ISBN 978–1–137–47433–9. Jane Taylor’s 1806 poem “The Star,” better known today as the children’s verse “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” highlights the two central and interlocking themes of Dometa…

Peter J. Capuano, Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body (The University of Michigan Press, 2015). 340pp. ISBN 9780472121403 Descriptions of hands flood Victorian novels, and yet, until now, they have received minimal critical attention when compared to other organs (e.g., faces, brains, eyes, skulls, etc.). Their pervasiveness, according to Pete…

Bernard Lightman and Bennett Zon (eds.), Evolution and Victorian Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2014), xviii + 320pp. £60 hb. ISBN 9781107028425 At first glance, it seems reasonable to wonder whether the academic world needs another books about Evolution and Victorian Culture. Monumental 1980s studies of Darwin’s influence on his society (most famously those by Gillian…