Category: Romantic and Victorian

Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). viii + 450pp. £32 hb. ISBN 978-0-19-920520-2. In The Victorians and the Visual Imagination Kate Flint highlights Victorian fascination with the processes and technologies of seeing, with the functionalities of vision as well as with their parallels to the then prevalent modalities of…

James Robert Allard, Romanticism, Medicine, and the Poet’s Body, The Nineteenth Century Series (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 174 pp. £50 hb. ISBN 0-7546-5891-7. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) James Allard’s title promises much: a consideration of the poet’s body in Romanticism no less. When one looks inside the book one finds that…

George Levine, Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge: CUP, 2008). ix+283 pp. £50 hb. ISBN 0-521-88526-3. In Realism, Ethics and Secularism, George Levine reaffirms once again his position as one of the most thoughtful and relevant critics working on literature and science over the last thirty years. (For my review…

Victoria Carroll, Science and Eccentricity: Collecting, Writing and Performing Science for Early Nineteenth-Century Audiences (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008). 254 pp. £60 hb. ISBN 1851969403. Victoria Carroll’s Science and Eccentricity: Collecting, Writing and Performing Science for Early Nineteenth-Century Audiences explores an astounding range of material from anecdotes about alligator wrestling to pastoral idylls about the…

Gregory Radick, The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate About Animal Language. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 575 pp. £31 hb. ISBN 0226702243. Gregory’s Radick’s much-welcome monograph recovers and adroitly lays bare the shifting evolutionary implications, institutional fortunes and intellectual capital of one of the most fascinating experimental paradigms in the history of science: the…

James Elwick, Styles of Reasoning in the British Life Sciences: Shared assumptions, 1820–1858 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007). 233 pp. £60 hb. ISBN 1851969209. James Elwick’s book is a fine-grained analysis of the diverse methodologies and philosophies of British ‘life researchers’ in the decades before the Origin of Species. ‘Life researcher’ is his umbrella term for…

Frankenstein’s Science: Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780-1830, ed. Christa Knellwolf and Jane Goodall (Aldershot and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2008), xi + 225 pp. £55 hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-5447-6 (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) This welcome collection of essays rightly places its emphasis on the scientific contexts in which Frankenstein was…

John Glendening, The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels: An Entangled Bank (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007), 225pp, £55.00 hb, ISBN 9780754658214 (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) In his exploration of late-Victorian fiction’s engagement with the complexities and confusions produced by Darwinism, John Glendening focuses on novels which critics have long acknowledged to be influenced…