Category: Romantic and Victorian
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Jenkins, Alice, Space and the ‘March of Mind’: Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain, 1815-1850
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by
Bernard Lightman
Alice Jenkins, Space and the ‘March of Mind’: Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain, 1815-1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 268 pp. £69.00 hb. ISBN 978-0-19-920992-7. Alice Jenkins’ ambitious study of British literary and scientific culture in the nineteenth century breaks new ground in at least two respects. The influential work of Gillian Beer…
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Brown, Laura, Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination
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by
Candice Kent
Laura Brown, Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 176 pp. £22.95 hb. ISBN 9780801448287. Laura Brown’s fascinating book is based on the premise that the eighteenth century is the locus of a novel engagement with animal-kind that continues to influence literature…
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Hagen, Margareth and Randi Koppen and Margery Vibe Skagen (eds), The Art of Discovery: Encounters in Literature and Science
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by
Jon Adams
Margareth Hagen, Randi Koppen and Margery Vibe Skagen (eds), The Art of Discovery: Encounters in Literature and Science (Aarhus and Copenhagen: Aarhus University Press, 2010), 275pp. € 33.95 pb. ISBN 978-87-7934-5010. A wealth of metaphors has been produced to describe the complex relationship between literature and science, each bearing its own set of implications. C.…
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Killeen, Kevin, Biblical Scholarship, Science and Politics in Early Modern England: Thomas Browne and the Thorny Place of Knowledge
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by
Mary Morrissey
Kevin Killeen, Biblical scholarship, science and politics in early modern England: Thomas Browne and the thorny place of knowledge (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 268 pp. £55 hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-5730-9. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) This thought-provoking monograph is one of several book-length publications on the writings of Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) in…
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Yi, Dongshin, A Genealogy of Cyborgothic
Dongshin Yi, A Genealogy of Cyborgothic: Aesthetics and Ethics in the Age of Posthumanism(Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 164pp. Hb £55.00. ISBN 978-1-4094-0039-4. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) Fearing the advent of cyborgs and genetically crafted organisms, opponents of technoscience typically shift their objections from rational bases to aesthetic ones: computers may one…
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Bauer, Heike, English Literary Sexology
Heike Bauer, English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion, 1860-1930 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 232 pp. £50 hb. ISBN 978-0230221635. This is, undoubtedly, an interesting and persuasive book. At first sight it could be seen to cover what has, of late, become familiar territory in late nineteenth-century studies – degeneration, sexology, the New Woman – and yet…
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Holmes, John, Darwin’s Bards
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,…
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Reiss, Benjamin, Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture
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…
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Jackson, Noel, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry
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,…
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Neville, Graham, Coleridge and Liberal Religious Thought: Romanticism, Science and Theological Tradition
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…
