Category: Romantic and Victorian

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…

M. M. Mahood, The Poet as Botanist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). xi + 269 pp; 8 illustrations. £50.00 hb.  ISBN 978-0521862363. This eminently readable labour of love offers some of the serendipity of an anthology,  but with a structured critical focus.  The author is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Kent but…

Peter W. Graham, Jane Austen and Charles Darwin: Naturalists and Novelists (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). 214 pp. £50 hb. ISBN 978-0754658511. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) In Jane Austen and Charles Darwin: Naturalists and Novelists, Peter W. Graham brings together two distinct trends in the study of literature and science. On the…

Elizabeth Green Musselman, Nervous Conditions: Science and the Body Politic in Early Industrial Britain (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006). 276 pp. £41.25 hb. ISBN 0791466795. If masculinity and science epitomised energy and rationality during Britain’s Industrial Revolution, why and how did so many natural philosophers suffer nervous illnesses? How do these experiences of…