Category: Romantic and Victorian

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…