Category: Romantic and Victorian

John Holmes, Darwin’s Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). xiv + 288 pp. £60.00, hb. ISBN: 9780748639403. Recently I did a Google Books search for the keywords ‘Darwin’ and ‘poetry’. Fittingly, John Holmes’s Darwin’s Bards topped the list. Published the year of Darwin’s bicentenary—and, of course,…

Benjamin Reiss, Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 237. £34.50 hb. ISBN: 0-226-70963-9. £14 pb ISBN: 0-226-70964-7. When Dickens first toured America in 1842, he decided to visit many of the country’s public charity institutions. At Boston he looked around the State Hospital…

Noel Jackson, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). pp. 288+xiv. £50.00 hb. ISBN 978-0521869379. It is by now a long time since the supposed hostility of Romantic poets to science was shown to be a myth—an extrapolation of Wordsworth’s ‘we murder to dissect’ made by C. P. Snow, among others,…

Graham Neville, Coleridge and Liberal Religious Thought: Romanticism, Science and Theological Tradition (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010), x+210 pp. £54.50 hb. ISBN 978-1848850897. Coleridge’s theological writings are less well known than they should be, partly because literary critics are aware of their lack of expertise in the field. Yet the young Coleridge movingly…

Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (London: Harper Collins, 2008), pp. xxi + 554. £25. ISBN 978-0-00-714952-0 The best feature of this fascinating survey of Romantic science is Richard Holmes’s skill in bringing to utterly believable life the domestic circumstances in which scientific discovery was…

Jason R. Rudy, Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2009). xiii + 222 pp. £40.50 hb. ISBN 0821418823. Electric Meters—the subject of which should not be confused with devices you may (or may not) have fitted to your power mains at home—is an ambitious and welcome addition to the growing field…

Thomas Söderqvist (ed.), The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). xv + 270 pp. £60 hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-5181-9. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) If the modern impulse to write biography—split between seriousness and celebrity, the cerebral and the gossipy—can be traced from James Boswell’s systematic courting and recording…

Bernhard Kuhn, Autobiography and Natural Science in the Age of Romanticism: Rousseau, Goethe, Thoreau (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 171 pp. £55 hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-6166-5. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) Bernhard Kuhn’s engaging study draws life writing into current academic debates concerning the historical relationship between the arts and sciences. Contesting C.P Snow’s…

Jenny Davidson, Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century(New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), xx+292 pp. £22.50 hb. ISBN 978-0-231-13878-9 (book), ISBN 978-0-231-51111-7 (ebook). Jenny Davidson’s original synthesis appeals equally to specialists in eighteenth-century literature and science, and readers interested in the history of the life sciences, agriculture, education or language. With elegance and…