Category: Romantic and Victorian

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…

Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830-1890, edited by Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998;repr. 2003). 456pp. £29 pb. ISBN 978-0198710424. Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth’s invaluable Embodied Selves achieves something quite different from Hunter and Macalpine’s seminal anthology Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry: 1535-1860 (1963). Taylor and Shuttleworth make…

Clark Lawlor, Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006). 248pp. £45 hb. ISBN  13: 978-0-230-02003. Clark Lawlor’s scholarly account of ‘consumption narratives’ is to be recommended as a well-informed and engaging contribution to the burgeoning field of interdisciplinary studies addressing the literary representation of disease. Consumption and Literature sets out…

Kirstie Blair, Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 288 pp. £56 hb. ISBN13: 978-0-19-927394-2 Of all the –ologies discussed in relation to Victorian literature—neurology, psychology, gynaecology, and even toxicology—cardiology is strangely absent from the list. Given the unhealthy Victorian interest in disease and death, it is surprising that…

David Amigoni, Colonies, Cults and Evolution: Literature, Science and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007). 237 pp. £50 hb. ISBN 978-0521884587. The last decade has witnessed an increasingly acrimonious divide between those scholars who seek to claim Darwinism for literature— to expose the discursive, intertextual, and even deconstructive qualities of nineteenth-century evolutionary writing—…

Pamela Gossin, Thomas Hardy’s Novel Universe: Astronomy, Cosmology, and Gender in the Post-Darwinian World (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007). xiii + 300 pp. £50 hb. ISBN 9780754603368 (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) There were gloomy deserts in those southern skies such as the north shows scarcely an example of […] The inspection…