Category: Romantic and Victorian
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Keene, Melanie, Science in Wonderland: The Scientific Fairytales of Victorian Britain
Melanie Keene, Science in Wonderland: The Scientific Fairytales of Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 256pp. Hb. £16.99 ISBN: 978-0-19-966265-4 Melanie Keene’s Science in Wonderland offers an engaging introduction to the Victorian use of wonder and fantastical elements in scientific writing and communication, particularly in works for children. Keene draws on a wide range…
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Ward, David, Coleridge and the Nature of Imagination: Evolution, Engagement with the World, and Poetry
David Ward, Coleridge and the Nature of Imagination: Evolution, Engagement with the World, and Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) David Ward’s approach to reading Coleridge through the ‘sciences of the brain’ (vii) yields a valuable contribution to scholarship on the Imagination in Coleridge’s poetry, with close readings of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, ‘Kubla Khan’…
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Marsden, Ben and Hazel Hutchison and Ralph O’Connor (eds), Uncommon Contexts: Encounters Between Science and Literature, 1800-1914
Marsden, Ben, Hazel Hutchison and Ralph O’Connor, eds. Uncommon Contexts: Encounters Between Science and Literature, 1800-1914. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013. 256pp £60 HB ISBN 978-1-84893-362-0 In his introduction, Ben Marsden frames Uncommon Contexts as a rejection of C.P. Snow’s dichotomy between the ‘two cultures’ of literature and science. Marsden’s objective in this collection is to cut across…
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Engels, Eve-Marie and Thomas F. Glick (eds), The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe
Eve-Marie Engels and Thomas F. Glick (eds), The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe , vols 1 and 2 (London: Continuum, 2008), lxxii + 659 pp, £225 hb, ISBN 9780826458339; Thomas F. Glick and Elinor Shaffer (eds), The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe , vols 3 and 4 (London: Bloomsbury Academic,…
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Salisbury, Laura and Andrew Shail (eds), Neurology and Modernity
Laura Salisbury and Andrew Shail (eds.), Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800-1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 298 pp. £60 Hb. ISBN 978-0-230-23313-3. Neurology and Modernity announces itself as a book which argues that ‘to speak of neurology and modernity is to describe a relationship of mutual constitution’ (1), describing the two…
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Dawson, Gowan and Bernard Lightman (eds), Victorian Science and Literature (8 vols)
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by
John Holmes
Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman (eds), Victorian Science and Literature, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011-12). 3408 pp. £700 hb (£350 per 4 volume set). ISBN 978-1848930919 and 978-1848930926. In their general introduction to their huge and handsome new anthology of Victorian writings about science, Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman spell out very clearly…
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Trower, Shelley, Senses of Vibration
Shelley Trower, Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound (London: Continuum, 2012). 214pp. £14.99 Pb. ISBN 9781441148636. Good vibrations, as the Beach Boys knew, promise more than just musical pleasure. Indeed, a history of modernity can be written from the perspective of vibration, as Shelley Trower demonstrates in this fascinating…
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Tate, Gregory, The Poet’s Mind
Gregory Tate, The Poet’s Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry, 1830-1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 224pp. £60 Hb. ISBN 978-0-19-965941-8. In The Poet’s Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry, Gregory Tate works, in the true spirit of BSLS, to repair what so much of the twentieth century has torn asunder – the close and complex relations between…
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Buckland, Adelene, Novel Science
Adelene Buckland, Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 400pp. £31.50 Hb. ISBN 9780226079684. Geology took on huge popularity in nineteenth-century Britain. Men and women of many backgrounds – miners and middle-class ladies as well as more gentlemanly scientific types – ventured out with hammers to find geological…
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Page, Michael, The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H. G. Wells
Michael R. Page, The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H. G. Wells: Science, Evolution, and Ecology (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012) vii+224pp. £49.50 hb. ISBN 978-1-4094-3869-4. BSLS members receive a discount on titles from Ashgate. In the introduction to The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H. G. Wells, Michael Page states that his aim is to…
