Category: Romantic and Victorian

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…

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…