Category: Romantic and Victorian

Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009). 224pp. £75 hb. ISBN 0708322239. Teresa Goddu’s assertion that ‘Gothic registers its culture’s anxieties’ frames an important literary theme in the nineteenth century. With medical theories such as physiology that reduced ‘man to “matter”’ (p. 5), scientific revelations such as Darwin’s…

Julia Reid, Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 241pp. £18.99 pb. ISBN: 978-0-230-23032-3. Julia Reid’s Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle has this year been published in paperback, no doubt partly as a result of very favourable reviews when it first appeared in 2006. We…

Tabitha Sparks, The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices, Nineteenth Century Series (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 177pp. £99.95 hb. ISBN: 978-0-7546-6802-2 (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) When Queen Victoria ascended to the throne in 1837, practitioners of medicine were enjoying new prestige and dominance; as population figures soared, so too did…

Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 564 pp. £31 hb. ISBN 0226481182. If there is one text that should be compulsory reading in science and literature in the nineteenth century, it must surely be this. It may have taken fifteen years to produce but…

Bernard Lightman and Aileen Fyfe (eds), Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). pp 432. hb £31. ISBN 0226276503. The study of ‘popular science’, one of the biggest growth areas in the history of science, is fraught with definitional difficulties. As Jonathan Topham reminds us in his illuminating…

Martin Willis, Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines: Science Fiction and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2006), viii + 272pp. £26.50 pb. ISBN 0-87338-857-7. In Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines, Martin Willis presents us with an entertaining and illuminating series of case studies reflecting on the popular imagining of…

Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay (eds), Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007).  xvi + 281 pp. £55 hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-5511-4. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) A couple of years ago, I set an experimental exercise for students on…