Category: Romantic and Victorian

Michael Gamer, Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) 330 pp. $80.00 PDF. £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781107158856 The value of Michael Gamer’s new book is not the novelty of its central argument. Jerome McGann has long since established his post-Althuserian conception of the textual materialities, both bibliographical and economic, which…

Ian Hesketh, Victorian Jesus: J.R. Seeley, Religion, and the Cultural Significance of Anonymity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017) xiii + 272 pp. 11 B&W illustrations. £36.00 Kindle. £38.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781442645776 To most modern readers, J. R. Seeley is familiar as the author of The Expansion of England (1883). Indeed, it was while researching Seeley’s contribution to…

Ron Broglio, Beasts of Burden: Biopolitics, Labor, and Animal Life in British Romanticism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017) xiii + 163 pp. $80.00 Hb. ISBN 9781438465678 The latest work from Ron Broglio probes the ways that British “Improvements” of the Romantic era –changes to the Poor Laws, reactions to food crises, labor…

Helena Ifill, Creating Character: Theories of Nature and Nurture in Victorian Sensation Fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2018) viii + 232 pp. £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-7849-9513-3 The ‘Queen of the Circulating Library’, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and her ‘literary father’ (in Braddon’s own estimate), Wilkie Collins, conquered the 1860s reading public in Britain and beyond with…

Lara Karpenko and Shalyn Claggett (eds), Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,2017) 312 pp. 8 B&W Illustrations. $60.00 Hb. ISBN:9780472130177 Strange Science is a thoughtfully compiled collection of essays exploring various intersections of Victorian fringe science and mainstream culture. The essays are grouped into three sections,…

Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2016) 272 pp. £72 Hb. ISBN: 9780719085413 The gothic imaginary foregrounds the body unlike any other imaginary. In her methodically researched and richly detailed work, Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal, Marie Mulvey-Roberts confirms this truth. Corporal parts, the bloodied bits, scraps and…

Alex Tankard, Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Invalid Lives (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2018) ix + 238 pp. £62.99 PDF & EPUB, £79.00 Hb. ISBN 978-3-319-71445-5 Alex Tankard’s Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Invalid Lives is a title in Palgrave Macmillan’s Literary Disability Studies, a series dedicated to literary readings informed by…

Michael Tondre, The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press 2018) 242 pp. $45.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780813941455 Michael Tondre considers the ways in which mathematical physics influenced Victorian literature, science, and statistics from 1850 to 1880. His book is divided into two parts, with four chapters that survey a…

Matthew Wilson Smith, The Nervous Stage: Nineteenth-century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre Oxford University Press 2017 240 pp. £29.99 Hb. ISBN: 9780190644086 In The Nervous Stage Matthew Wilson Smith unfolds a fascinating world of relationships between nineteenth-century studies on the nerves and drama, in order to demonstrate that the roots of brain research…

Nicholas Roe (ed.), John Keats and the Medical Imagination (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2017) xviii + 262 pp. EPUB, PDF £56.99, £72 Hb. ISBN: 978-3-319-63810-2 John Keats and the Medical Imagination is a compilation of ten specially commissioned essays based on contributions to the third Keats Bicentenary Conference at Guy’s Hospital, May 2015. The focus of…