Category: Romantic and Victorian

Keridiana W. Chez, Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men: Affect and Animals in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2017) 212 pp. 4 illustrations. $69.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780814213346. This study explores how transatlantic novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth century portrayed the dog, in various representations and subjectivities, as an interspecies prosthesis…

Amara Thornton, Archaeologists in Print: Publishing for the People (London: UCL Press, 2018) 312pp. £40.00 Hb. ISBN: 978‑1‑78735‑259‑9  £20.00 Pb ISBN: 978‑1‑78735‑258‑2 Free Open Access ISBN: 978‑1‑78735‑257‑5. Amara Thornton’s Archaeologists and Print: Publishing for the People (2018) examines the intricate and nuanced relationship between archaeologists and publishers in the late nineteenth and twentieth century. Acknowledging…

Stella Pratt-Smith, Transformations of Electricity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016) 176 pp. 9 B&W illustrations. £125.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781472419408 This book considers the literary representations and potential applications of electricity, as explored in British canonical, popular, and scientific works of the nineteenth century. Stella Pratt-Smith analyses the development of various theoretical and…

Richard Adelman, Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 248 pp. $84.00 PDF. £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781108424134 Richard Adelman’s Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900 is the second volume in a project concerned with the fraught relation between the concepts of labour and aesthetic contemplation in British literature, cultural theory, and political economy.…

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…