Category: Romantic and Victorian

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…

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…

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…

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…

Christine Ferguson, Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American Spiritualist Writing, 1848-1930 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012) x + 230 pp. £70 hb. ISBN 978 0 748 639656 Determined Spirits is part of the Edinburgh University Press series ‘Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture’, whose General Editor is Julian Wolfreys. The aim of…

John Rignall, H. Gustav Klaus and Valentine Cunningham (eds.), Ecology and the Literature of the British Left: The Red and the Green (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). xi + 167 pp. £60 hb. ISBN 978 1 4094 1822 1. BSLS members are entitled to a 20% discount on Ashgate titles. Click here for details. This collection of sixteen essays…

Hilary Grimes, The Late Victorian Gothic: Mental Science, the Uncanny, and Scenes of Writing (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 188 pp. £55 hb. ISBN 9781409427209 BSLS members are entitled to a 20% discount on Ashgate titles. Click here for details. Hilary Grimes’s The Late Victorian Gothic considers, as the introduction states, ‘the ways in which writers and…