Category: Romantic and Victorian

Peter Garratt, Victorian Empiricism: Self, Knowledge, and Reality in Ruskin, Bain, Lewes, Spencer, and George Eliot (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010), 244pp. £34.95 hb. ISBN 9780838642665 Peter Garratt is certainly right to point out from the outset of his book just how slippery the term “empiricism” really is. I remember the sense of conceptual…

Jill L Matus, Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 264 pp. £59 hb. ISBN 9780521760249. The title Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction does not quite do justice to the ambitious remit of this study, which engages, in innovative fashion, with two other hot topics in…

Katherine Byrne, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 223pp. £55 hb. ISBN 978–0–521–76667–8. It has become something of a cliché to observe just how destructive consumption or pulmonary tuberculosis was in the nineteenth century and before: one in four people suffered from it, so writers like Thomas Beddoes claimed. Arguably…

Tamara Ketabgian, The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2011), 252pp. Pb £30.50. ISBN 0472051407. This fascinating and challenging book stages an intervention not only in our habitual readings of the Victorian industrial novel, but also in our larger sense of how and…

Ryan Barnett and Serena Trowbridge (eds), Acts of Memory: The Victorians and Beyond (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 169pp. £34.99 pb. ISBN 978-1-4438-2567-2. As Ryan Barnett and Serena Trowbridge point out in their introduction to Acts of Memory: The Victorians and Beyond, the discourse of memory permeates the literature of the Victorian period. Memory does not…

Meegan Kennedy, Revising the Clinic: Vision and Representation in Victorian Medical Narrative and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), 261 pp. $39.95 hb ISBN 978-0-8142-1116-8 Meegan Kennedy’s first book, Revising the Clinic: Vision and Representation in Victorian Medical Narrative and the Novel, offers a head-on and provocative exploration into how Victorian medical practitioners…

Ian Hesketh, The Science of History in Victorian Britain: Making the Past Speak (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011) 240pp. £60 hb ISBN 978 1 84893 126 8. As all students of cultural history are aware, the way we categorise thinkers depends on the criterion by which we look at them. Victorian historiography is no exception. In…

Virginia Richter, Literature After Darwin: Human Beasts in Western Fiction, 1859-1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2011), 272pp, £50 hb, ISBN: 9780230273405 Darwin’s evolutionary theories shattered traditional ideas of human identity. Common origins with the brutes reduced the human from fallen angel to rising ape; and even this image of progressive development was undermined by random mutation and…

Barri J. Gold, ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010) 336 pp. £22.95 hb. ISBN 978-0-262-01372-7 Thermodynamics is the only area of the physical sciences that has received more than occasional attention from studies of Victorian literature and science, where the focus has more commonly been on biology, geology and…

Laurie Garrison, Science, Sexuality and Sensation Novels: Pleasures of the Senses (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 248pp, £50.00 hb, ISBN 9780230203167 Of all Victorian literary genres, sensation fiction is perhaps the one which has leant itself most readily to interdisciplinary readings concerning its engagement with contemporary science and pseudo-science. The depiction of extreme mental states such…