Category: Romantic and Victorian

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…

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…

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’…

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,…