Category: Romantic and Victorian
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Ferguson, Christine, Determined Spirits
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…
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Rignall, John et al. (eds), Ecology and the Literature of the British Left
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…
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Grimes, Hilary, The Late Victorian Gothic
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…
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Lynall, Gregory, Swift and Science
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by
Allan Ingram
Gregory Lynall, Swift and Science: The Satire, Politics, and Theology of Natural Knowledge, 1690-1730 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), xii + 209 pp. Hb £50.00 ISBN 9780230343641. No period before the modern age saw such dizzying scientific progress as that covered by Greg Lynall’s book. In all fields of scientific knowledge, but most strikingly, and challengingly, in physics,…
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Levine, George, Darwin the Writer
George Levine, Darwin the Writer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) xvii+272pp. £19.99 hb ISBN 9780199608420 BSLS members are entitled to a 20% discount on academic titles published by Oxford University Press. Click here for details. All of the world is a rastro, Darwinian eyes will trace it, Darwinian exuberance and wonder precede and follow from it. (217) The…
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Levine, George, Darwin Loves You
George Levine, Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 336 pp. £17.95 hb. ISBN: 978-0691126630 Chapter 1 available online at Princeton University Press site. George Levine’s new book Darwin Loves You takes its title from a bumper sticker, a half-knowing and half-urgent counterpoint to the ubiquitous ‘Jesus Loves You’ emblazoned on the backs…
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Stiles, Anne, Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century
Anne Stiles, Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 274 pp. £55 hb. ISBN 9781107010017. ‘What is perhaps most striking about late-nineteenth-century theories about insanity and genius is their persistence in modern culture’ (154) writes Anne Stiles, in Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century.…
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Colligan, Colette and Margaret Linley (eds), Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century and Alex Goody, Technology, Literature and Culture
Colette Colligan and Margaret Linley, eds., Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century: Image, Sound, Touch. The Nineteenth Century (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 302 pp. £ 60.00 hb. ISBN 978-1-4094-0009-7. Alex Goody, Technology, Literature and Culture. Themes in 20th and 21st Century Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 193 pp. £ 15.99 pb. ISBN…
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Dawson, Gowan, Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability
Gowan Dawson, Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), xii + 286 pp. £64 ISBN: 9780521872492 Charles Darwin did not much care for literature. His autobiography confessed an intolerance of poetry, a love of middlebrow fiction and, in later life, feelings of nausea when reading Shakespeare. It is, therefore, perhaps ironic that…
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O’Connor, Ralph, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856
Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 448 pp. £ 31 hb. ISBN 9780226616681. The geologist, like the historian, is constantly faced with the difficulties of incomplete evidence. Gaps in strata spanning thousands or millions of years, partial skeletons, and limited information…
